Original subtitles

Synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence.

Basically, it’s when these two events correspond

in a way that seems highly improbable, highly unlikely,

but also deeply meaningful for that person.

It relates to some aspect of their life

in a way that feels significant

and purposeful and intended.

Almost by some other kind of consciousness.

Now coincidences happen for sure,

but this is almost in the realm of deja vu

where it seems like there’s something more to it,

particularly when the synchronicities drop all at once,

and there’s one after another, after another

in a way that feels something else is going on,

something bigger.

That’s what started this case

And that’s what plagued us throughout the case.

In order to trace the synchronicity back for me,

we have to go back to the spring of 2016.

I was finishing up my work at the Stanley Hotel,

I was the Resident Paranormal Investigator there.

I was shooting a web series called Spirits of the Stanley

and the final public paranormal event that they hosted in April

was the first time that I met Greg and Dana Newkirk

who run the Traveling Museum of the Paranormal and the Occult,

a popular blog website called Week In Weird

and they’re doing a ton of very novel, very interesting paranormal experiments

in the broader field in general.

We became instant friends. We kept in touch.

A couple months later, in June, Dana posted a blog entry on Week in Weird

about the top five indie paranormal projects people should check out.

And she was very kind enough to include Spirits of the Stanley on the list.

As I scrolled through the article, I noticed another post

about the Euphomet podcast that Jim Perry puts on.

In the article, there was an embedded episode,

and that one that they chose was an interview with Greg.

It was about an hour long interview,

and it was all about this very bizarre, strange case of these Kentucky Goblins

and these weird emails that Greg had gotten starting in about 2012.

I didn’t get a chance to listen to it that June,

but I returned to it in September,

and I got immediately enthralled in the story.

Take us back

to after you received that second message from David.

He describes events that have pretty much left his family in terror,

small, hairless entities, and someone who calls himself "Terry Wriste?"

I thought it was a good story,

but I wasn’t totally on board.

I mean, anyone can write a great story.

Was this ringing a bell with Kentucky?

Was there evidence that there were mines? That this was…

The only thing that it seemed to have anything in common with

was there were some themes that related to the Hopkinsville Goblins case

that happened back in 1955.

And in 1955, this family in this farmhouse was besieged

by these tiny creatures that they thought were from outer space.

I got about halfway through the episode,

paused it, went over to Twitter,

and I blasted it out.

Couple minutes later, Greg hit me back…

I wrote him back.

And then I noticed their Week in Weird account posted an article

about the same Kentucky Goblins case.

Now, thinking that Greg and Dana had used that as an opportunity

to plug their page and their website

because I was talking about it already,

I hit them back with a post that said “I see what you did there”

or something along those lines.

Greg writes back and says, “That wasn’t us who posted that.”

What he told me was that it was a random auto-post

that draws from the entire archive of different Week in Weird articles

and posts throughout the day.

And further, there were 1700 articles

on Week in Weird,

that it could have drawn from,

and there were only two about this Kentucky Goblins case.

Greg had recorded that entire interview six months beforehand

and it was random that I even clicked on the blog

and started listening to the podcast at the time

and equally random that we had this 1 in almost 900 chance

that their account should post,

let alone at the time that it did, right in the middle of me listening to it.

It felt extremely unlikely,

and it felt very pointed,

particularly as I listened to the end of the episode

and I realized: this was a cliffhanger.

There was more work to be done.

And not only did I want to be a part of it,

I felt supernaturally called to be a part of it

by this synchronicity.

And in the two weeks that followed, it was a synchronicity storm,

there was just one after another after another

all tangentially relating to this Kentucky Goblins case.

So here we are, almost a year to the date

after that series of synchronicities that called me to this case,

and we’re going out to Kentucky…

And we’re going to do our best to try and figure out what was going on.

When I say that I’ve investigated the paranormal for like twenty years,

I typically just don’t even count the first five

because it was all stuff based on things that I’d read

or things that might’ve been on television,

watched a lot of World’s Scariest Places and stuff like that,

and based everything we’d done off of that.

But eventually, the longer we were in this...

Dana and I even met because we ran rival ghost hunting websites as kids

and eventually we got together

and we started to try and think of things a little bit differently.

So we come from a pretty hardcore ghost hunting background.

That was really what we started out as.

And then eventually we started to look into things like bigfoot

or we’d start to look into things like UFO sightings

and then we’d start to get into people who believed

that there was some kind of weird unifying theory

that mixed all this stuff together.

And so that’s where we’ve stayed.

We really strongly believe that if more paranormal researchers

would communicate with each other

from different communities...

Like ghost hunters don’t typically talk to bigfoot hunters

and bigfoot hunters don’t really talk to UFO investigators,

but if they did,

they’d notice that there’s a lot of weird crossover there.

So as far as we’re concerned, there’s really nothing that’s too weird.

In fact, the weirder, the better.

I think that…

I mean, initially, it started off as a joke.

Our first kind of adventure away from ghosts was bigfoot

and it was as a joke, again like by accident,

we went out to have fun with a guy that we thought was probably crazy

and he was crazy,

but he also brought us to places where we were experiencing legitimate activity

You’ve got five rounds in here.

Five rounds...

- You always save the last one for yourself…

- Okay.

It kind of felt the same way

that it did when we both first started ghost hunting.

The first few times that you experience something

that you legitimately can't explain,

it fuels your curiosity and continues to push you forward.

I think it tends to happen that the longer

somebody researches this type of stuff,

and the more broad that they decide to cast their net,

the more they realize things are so much stranger on an even deeper level.

So it’s anything from: “Are we causing hauntings with our mind?”

to “Is bigfoot just the ghost of a Neaderthalic man?”

Stuff like that. The longer you do it,

the more you start to see this stuff that never quite adds up in popular theory

but when you start researching a little bit deeper,

you start to see people like John Keel, who believed in window areas

and that all kinds of stuff came from it.

And then you start to believe things like:

“Well, maybe UFOs aren’t coming from outer space,

maybe they’re coming from here, from another type of dimension.”

And that’s the type of stuff that’s really hard to tell people

and get them to swallow,

because it’s hard enough to tell them

that there’s a giant, hairy creature in the woods,

or that there’s aliens coming and abducting people

and performing experiments on cows and stuff like that.

It all just comes from continuing to follow these rabbit holes,

and it just gets weirder and weirder the longer you’re in it.

I think when you start to invite that type of weird thinking into your life,

that type of stuff just has a habit of finding you then.

And I don’t know if that’s because you’re paying more attention to it,

and you’re trying to look for those weird connections,

or if it’s because they’re like, “Oh, somebody's paying attention,

let’s go screw with that guy.”

It's nice...

to be married to someone who is equally as weird as you are.

It’s always nice,

especially when both of us have such huge histories in the paranormal

because then you can go on all these weird adventures together.

Our dynamic is different, and it changes from case to case

and from even just subject to subject.

There are specific things, like for instance,

when it comes to UFO research,

I tend to take a little bit more of a skeptical stance.

And that’s really just because it’s not my world,

and I don’t know as much about it as Greg does,

so I tend to come at it from an outsider’s perspective,

which makes me analyze people a lot more

than I would from a ghost perspective,

which is, I’m all in

That’s where I feel the most comfortable.

For the most part, Greg tends to go in to all of the things we investigate

ready to believe.

Not in a, like, “everything’s a ghost!”

or “everything’s a bigfoot!”

It’s not necessarily like that, he’s just ready to believe people.

And I think that I tend to be a little bit more standoffish.

So I’m more about observing how people tell me their stories

and the nuances of those stories

and then comparing them to evidence at the same time.

So it’s good because I think that we will balance each other out

and we don’t let each other get too carried away

because when one starts to go into a place where “everything’s a ghost”

or “everything’s a bigfoot,"

the other person is there to go, "Let’s reign it in a little bit,

pull back and look at it.”

And we’re good at pulling each other out of that running around screaming,

"everything’s paranormal!"

We’re pretty good at that for the most part.

So, I started as a ghost hunter.

That’s what I started doing.

And the name of my ghost hunting team when I was a kid

was Ghost Hunters Incorporated.

It wasn’t because we were incorporated.

We just thought that it sounded cool.

We were like 13-years old and thought it was badass.

So we were Ghost Hunters Incorporated

and it was something that we kept up for the better part of a decade.

We had this website that we maintained

and it had all of our adventures on it

and it was pretty irreverent to put it lightly.

We weren’t the most serious.

That’s kind of the reason why I say

I don’t really count the first five years of my history

because it was basically just kids screwing around

in graveyards and abandoned houses at night.

There was a point where I had left my hometown in Pennsylvania

and I'd moved out to Seattle.

And that was about the time when GHI just kind of fell apart.

And it just kind of died.

But, with a lot of stuff, the website just sits there.

And we didn’t really want to kill it

because it had all of our fun adventures and stuff like that.

And one of the things that still just sat there was an email address.

And it was for Ghost Hunters Incorporated.

And I would occasionally check it.

Like, every few months I’d give it a check.

And at this point, it was 2012.

I was living in Canada,

was getting ready to go through Canadian immigration

,

And I went to check the email address,

and there was an email in it

from this guy who called himself “David Christie.”

It was this urgent email...

I think actually if I remember correctly,

the title was: “Urgent.

Need Help, Please Advise" or something like that.

The email was about how these little creatures on this man’s property

in a town called Hellier, Kentucky,

were coming out of mine shafts,

and they were terrorizing his family.

And I was like: “oh, that’s different…

I don’t normally get anything like that.”

Especially as a ghost hunter.

Like, why would this guy email ghost hunters?

So I sat there and I thought about it, and I was like:

“Alright, the website hasn’t been updated in like seven years,

does he have the wrong address?”

I mean, one of the main pictures on the front of the website

was a bunch of kids in bowling shirts, carrying medieval weapons...

Like, that was our thing!

We had medieval weapons and we had torches

and BB guns and stuff.

We weren't really...

We weren’t really the picture of professionalism,

especially for an honest case.

So I thought, okay,

either this guy's got the wrong email address

or it’s just somebody screwing around.

So I just wrote an email back and I was like,

I think I kind of jokingly said,

“I’m sorry but I don’t really have any expertise in alien, monster cases,

but if you want to fill me in on more details, I’d love to hear it.”

And I thought, oh, I’ll never hear that again.

Or one of my friends will be like, “Ah, I did it. It was funny.”

It wasn’t too much later that a longer, like three-page email arrived…

For the past six months,

I have been living in a rural home

located on the border of West Virginia and Kentucky,

where my family is nightly assaulted by creatures

that I have come to believe are of an extraterrestrial origin.

These beings appear to be the size and stature of a small child,

devoid of any facial features save for large, oily eyes and lipless mouths.

They frighten my children by peering through their bedroom windows,

chirping at one another.

They actively attempt to enter my home in the middle of the night.

Last month, they took my dog.

I believe that they are coming from an abandoned mine

located on the edge of my property.

Though I am armed,

I’m afraid that I’m far too frightened to enter the mine by my lonesome

and cannot convince any sympathetic friends to accompany me,

though I cannot blame them.

I was given your contact information through a man by the name of Terry Wriste.

When these disturbances first began occurring,

I was only inclined to confide in a personal friend

who I knew had fringe interests.

He offered to share my concerns with a man

that had dealt with somewhat similar experiences in pervious years.

I accepted his offer.

Within a week, I was informed that this gentleman

had long since retired from pursuits of this kind,

but was willing to provide me with contacts who may be willing to help.

This is how I came to contact you.

I do not have any answer to why,

other than a referral and a recommendation from a gentleman

I do not know personally.

I was under the impression that you would answer that question.

Most of Pike County is made up of small towns and rural communities.

It is not uncommon to go days without seeing my closest neighbors.

I moved to this area for the peace and quiet.

I have received neither.

I have lived in this area for just under seven months

and in that time, the majority of the harassment

has occurred within the past three.

I did not become aware of any strangeness until early December,

although that is only when I began to keep a record of these events.

At first it was merely strange tracks in the snow around my home.

I had initially imagined that they were some kind of animal,

though it closely resembled a human footprint, minus the heel.

At that time, I was under the impression that it was simply a single creature.

It wasn’t until weeks later that I began to suspect

that I was dealing with a number of what I thought

were individuals hazing me upon my arrival to the area.

In the weeks leading up to this particular evening,

I had awoken to find my shed doors open on several occasions,

many of my children's toys missing or moved

and my yard in general disarray.

The second week of January, I am having breakfast with my family

when my five-year-old daughter begins talking about the kids without hair.

When my wife inquired about these kids,

she informed us that she had spent the previous night

watching them play in the yard.

As you can imagine, this was some concern.

I asked my daughter what these kids looked like.

She told me they were bald like Grandpa, and weren’t wearing any clothes.

The very same day I found the wreath that hangs inside our rear porch

stuffed into our mailbox.

I purchased and installed motion-activated floodlights the following day

and for a time, the problem ceased.

It wasn’t until the end of February that our daughter informed us

that the bald kids had returned.

I was awoken to the sound of my daughter screaming.

I rushed to her bedroom only to meet her halfway down the hall.

When my wife and I were finally able to calm her down enough to speak,

she told us that the kids were trying to peer into her window,

but they couldn’t reach and instead had taken to tapping on it.

She hasn’t slept in her own bedroom since.

Almost every day for the following week,

I would find some evidence

that something or someone had been on my property

the previous night.

On Wednesday, the seventh of March,

I finally witnessed the kids without hair for myself.

The dog woke me up around 1:30 a.m.,

scratching at the back door and whimpering to be let out.

I noticed that the motion floodlight was on and went to the kitchen window

to check that the shed doors were still closed,

when I realized I could see the shadow of an individual cast across my lawn.

From the angle I was positioned at the window,

I could not actually see the source of the shadow or the floodlights.

The dog was pacing circles around the back door,

and I could hear someone rifling through a box on the porch.

Filled with a little more anger than common sense,

the only reaction I could muster

was to bang loudly on the window and yell,

at which point I heard the screen door on the porch swing open

and slam against the house.

I heard what I can only describe as chirping at this point.

It sounded much like a skunk, if more guttural.

I then realized that there were more than two people on my property.

And the shadow, which had been reacting as if it didn’t know which way to run,

was quickly joined by another.

For a moment, I watched as the shadows chirped at one another,

when I noticed a figure out of the corner of my eye.

Standing in the flower bed, just to the bottom left of my window

was a small, humanoid figure with silky, pale skin, completely hairless,

standing roughly four feet.

It was looking in the direction of the shadows,

and had clearly come from around the left side of the house,

opposite the porch

and had not noticed me as far as I could tell.

It’s face was devoid of features, save for large, round eyes,

very reminiscent in shape and color of a birds’ eye.

It had no nose to speak of and only a small slit for a mouth.

It didn’t appear to move its mouth as it chirped,

sounding more as if noises originated from its throat.

It was most certainly not a wild animal, and even more certainly not a child.

I was too terrified to move,

and watched as the creature hopped to the others,

and together they scrambled into the woods on the right side of my property.

It was clear that there was at least five in the group.

I have not mentioned this particular incident to my wife.

The only other person who I have spoken to about these creatures are yourself

and the close friend who introduced me

to our mutual friend, Mr. Wriste.

At that point, I said,

“We’d love to come check it out, but we need some kind of proof,

we need some kind of evidence

that there’s something actually going on here,

and that you’re not just pulling our leg.”

And “would you let us film this if we came out and did it?”

And the guy said, “Yeah, that’s totally fine.

I just want complete anonymity because I’m a doctor,

and it would hurt my reputation if any of this stuff got out.”

So, my initial response to all of it was…

You know, I was suspicious.

And I was...

I was kind of like, “Yeah, okay.”

He would read me the emails, and I would be like, “Okay. Goblins. Sure.”

And then when... I mean...

For me the first time that I actually stopped and went,

like: “Okay, this is legitimately strange”

was when we got the pictures.

At first I was like, “holy shit, these are crazy,

these are nuts.

I’ve never seen anything like it.”

But I’m not an outdoorsy person.

I don’t know a ton of animal tracks.

So I sent it to every outdoorsy person...

I think, actually, I posted it to Facebook first.

And was like, “look at this weird stuff that we’re getting.

What in the world are these?”

And a lot of people chimed in saying, “Maybe it’s an emu…

But that’s really strange.

I don’t know why there’d be an emu at this place,

and their pacing isn’t proper.”

But a lot of the bigfoot hunters that I know started to go:

“What’s really interesting about this is

these all look like they have dermal ridges.”

And dermal ridges are basically like fingerprints for feet and hands.

They’re like the crease lines in the feet

and they’re extremely hard to fake.

So whatever was leaving these actually had some creases in the foot,

these dermal ridges.

So, it was a fleshy footprint,

which means it wouldn’t have been an emu,

because I think they have talons.

And it kind of just looked like fat fingers.

Like three fat fingers.

After that point, I was like, okay,

maybe there is something really strange going on here.

The emails were weirdly written.

They felt… almost like…

It’s strange going back and re-reading them

because for me, when I do read them, they almost feel a little…

Like there’s something completely off about whoever is writing it.

It almost for me felt like someone trying to get us to go somewhere,

and that was setting off alarms.

So yeah, when we did get the pictures,

I didn’t lose that kind of fear

that was innately already there,

but then I was curious.

So I sent him another email

and I said, “Yeah, okay, you got my attention. We’re into this.

How do you want to go about this?”

Because I was in Canada at the time.

Going to Kentucky wasn’t an easy trip for me.

I wasn’t even allowed to leave the country while I was going through immigration.

So I told him, “We’re definitely interested in doing this.

Are you still going to be there?

Are you going to be able to take pictures of more stuff?

I need something that shows how big the footprints are.”

Because you can’t really tell how big they are.

And I think it was three... Two or three months later,

he emails back and says “I had to flee the house.

I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch.

I had to move my family out. Things just got too crazy.

We just don’t feel safe here.”

And he said, “I’m going to be going back to the house,

I will take more photographs

if I can find anything else,

and I’ll do my best to show you how big everything is.

I’ll be there for like three or four nights.

I’m going back to collect all of our stuff.”

I think it was with his brother-in-law.

And sure enough, couple days later,

another series of photos come in,

and they’re the same type of footprint.

They look like they were taken somewhere else.

But they had a measuring stick next to it.

And it showed that they were like half the size of a regular human footprint.

So they were tiny and they were kind of round.

They didn’t look like they had any kind of heel on them.

And also attached were a series of really dark photographs

that he claimed were of the creatures themselves

that he had taken from his back porch.

Like, it doesn’t…

Yeah, it’s nothing.

One of them we just kind of threw out immediately

because you can’t really see anything.

It almost looks like a big round thing

with like two big black eyes possibly?

But the other ones were a little more interesting.

That one looks like a fucking "gray" alien.

One of them looked like the side profile

of a typical extraterrestrial "gray" that you’d see.

Shoulder. Eye. High cheekbones.

That one, to me…

Again, it could be anything…

Because that's like a profile shot of an extraterrestrial.

That’s what that looks like.

And then the other one looked like something was leaning around a tree.

And it was really hard to make out what size it was.

But you could see that whatever it was had a completely bald head,

wasn’t wearing any kind of clothes to speak of,

it was a kind of weird whitish, yellowish color.

You could see what looks like a shoulder and a hand reaching out.

It’s like, why is it glowing?

I know.

Which was an interesting detail of the original Hopkinsville case

is they glowed.

Mm-hm.

I was like:

I’m in. We’re going.

We’re gonna go check this thing out.

We’re gonna put everything on hold.

This is crazy.

I have no idea what this could be.

But if this guy is serious…

I don’t think we’re equipped to blow up a mine

But,

I definitely want to go check this out,

especially if we can video all of this stuff.

And I said, “Yeah, that’s it. We’ll come down.

We’ll check it out.”

And...

Never heard from him again.

And that was the end.

So I posted this stuff to my Facebook page

and people were like, just freaking out.

We kind of unofficially put together what we called

The Alien Cave Base Task Force

which was going to be just a big group of people

and we were going to go down

and we were going to find these things

and we were figure out what was going on.

And then I decided to write an article about it for Week in Weird.

And it was one of those further calls where it was like:

“Can anyone tell me something that sounds similar to this?”

And the only thing that we found

that really kind of matched up with everything

was an old sighting that happened in Hopkinsville,

the other end of Kentucky,

back in 1955.

And in this case, it was an entire family of people, living in a farmhouse...

I think there were eleven people.

And there was a UFO sighting that happened.

It was witnessed by police officers.

One of the most well-documented UFO cases ever,

especially in terms of extraterrestrial encounters,

because so many credible witnesses saw these things and drew these things

and gave credible testimonies.

Eleven people in a farmhouse

said that after this UFO crashed

not too far from their land,

these little creatures that were about 3-feet tall,

showed up at the house, were looking in the windows

especially at the children,

were showing up in the doorway,

just freaking everybody out.

And they actually fired at these creatures.

And they ended up fleeing.

It was a media circus at this point.

Tons of people were camping out in this family’s lawn,

trying to figure out what these things were.

They dubbed them “goblins”

because back then they didn’t really know what to call them.

The only thing that was weird is these things had these big ears

that the ones that this David guy,

he didn’t describe any ears on them.

He just said that they had these kind of bald, round heads.

But, in some of the early drawings by the police officers,

they look like they were wearing goggles and headpieces.

So those ears might not have even been ears at all,

they could have been something different.

And if you remove those and take them away,

everything fits:

They look the same, they were interested in the children,

they were terrorizing a farmhouse

in the middle of nowhere, in Kentucky.

But, it was in the complete opposite end of the state.

So, we thought, well that’s the closest thing

that we can find to something like this,

so there’s a precedent for this stuff,

there’s a precedent for it happening in Kentucky.

Sure, there’s like 60 years in-between them,

and a few hundred miles, but...

maybe it’s these Kentucky Goblins.

And that’s as far as we got.

The guy that told David to contact us,

apparently had a mutual friend of ours

whose name was Terry Wriste.

The name doesn’t even sound real.

Like, when you’re reading it, it sounds like a normal name,

but when you say it out loud,

“Terry Wriste,”

it’s “terrorist.”

It’s obviously like a pseudonym of some kind.

And I wracked my brain to think like,

“Do I know anybody who uses this?

Is this somebody’s online handle?

Is it anybody I know?”

I couldn’t figure out anybody who would use it,

especially in this day and age, right?

And so I started to Google “Terry Wriste.”

The only hit that I would get for that name

came from a really weird,

obscure book about using magic rituals to summon extraterrestrials.

And it was by a guy by the name of Allen Greenfield,

who was an occultist and also a UFO investigator.

It was from 1994.

It was calledSecret Cipher of the UFOnauts

And nothing in the book mentions Terry Wriste

until the appendix in the back of the book,

because there’s like a 3-4 page interview with this guy,

who goes by the pseudonym “Terry R. Wriste.”

And it was all about this guy who claimed that

him and a bunch of other Vietnam veterans,

they went around to different underground bases

where there were extraterrestrials, had set up shop

and they would go in there and basically clean them out.

So they were kind of like a real Alien Cave Base Task Force.

But again, as crazy as that sounded, this whole book,

this Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts

was presented as complete fact.

And it was all about using

occult rituals

to contact extraterrestrials.

And it just seemed strange that this whole thing

about these crazy, fantastical, cave explorations

by ass-kicking alien cave base task force Vietnam vets

would be in there if it wasn’t relevant somehow.

And that was the only reference to a Terry Wriste I could find.

And it was from 1994.

So, at this point,

we had started working on another project.

We were doing a little web series

and we went out to Brown Mountain, North Carolina.

Part of the project was, you know, these experiments,

asking these big questions like

“Can you get abducted by aliens?”

So yeah, we went to a place that technically

we should have been able to be abducted by aliens.

So we went to Brown Mountain.

Didn’t get abducted by aliens.

But a friend of ours, Micah Hanks, said,

“Hey, while you’re out here,

there’s something really cool that I think I should show you guys.

A psychic told me that there's an entrance to an underground base

where aliens have set up shop.”

And we were immediately like,

“Oh god, this reminds us of the goblins.

We’ve got to go check this thing out.”

Now you’ve heard stories, clearly, that there are underground bases

somewhere here in these mountains?

Yeah.

As a matter of fact, one of the popular legends is that there’s one

mostly associated with the Brown Mountain area,

which is just of back over behind us,

we’re on Table Rock right now.

But a lot of the stories are that there are indeed rumblings and happenings

right here under Table Rock, where we are right now

One of the best stories that I heard years and years ago

was from a man, he was a UFO investigator here in the region,

who had said that he had been contacted by people

who had kept talking about the military presence

at Brown Mountain and in the Linville Gorge

and furthermore that a psychic had told him

that there was an entrance to a base

right under this mountain.

And so I kind of, you know, took that with a grain of salt,

but in truth, with all the cave openings and entrances

like the one I brought you through

to get to this majestic vantage here on Table Rock,

in my opinion, if there was any place that you'd want to hide

something like that, this would be ideal for it, wouldn’t it?

So he led us on this crazy path that went down,

around the side of the mountain,

and then just as the psychic had predicted,

there were these two big pillars,

and then between the pillars was the entrance to this cave.

We are now at the entrance of the cave here.

But I know that there are people that are convinced

that the Brown Mountain Lights

emanate from a UFOlogical kind of phenomena of some sort

and then of course that there is a base under Table Rock

and so for all we know,

we’re entering the lower extremities of that base right now.

And it went in a fair amount,

but once we got in there,

you could see that there was this big rock slab that had kind of...

It almost looked like it had just been placed there.

And it looked weird enough for you to go, like,

“that shouldn’t be there.”

That didn’t just like, fall off that mountain,

and perfectly slide into this hole

that is a cave,

You know, that a couple of us tried to actually get into it.

And you could see kind of through it.

It wasn’t like a perfect square, like a door, but...

it was enough that the shape of it was strange.

If you stand right here, you can feel the air moving down

through the chimney.

Look at that!

That looks like that was placed there, doesn’t it?

That’s what I said when I first came here.

That rock, it juts out at you. It’s just really weird.

You know, you can see back up to the chimney.

It’s a surreal environment, you know?

You know, all jokes about alien cave bases aside...

Now watch, I’m going to turn over some rock,

and then a panel is going to open, and there’s going to be a stairway

and an alien waiting for us

- What do you guys think? - This is amazing.

- Do you think that this is the entrance to an alien cave?

- Do you know what? If there was an entrance...

Hey can get a light over here real quick, you guys?

Yeah.

Here, grab this big guy.

Your mind will play tricks on you…

You’d have to...

I wonder if you’d have to climb up over that rock right there,

on the top. Because there’s definitely an opening

big enough for a body up there.

I never even looked at that.

Is there though?

Well, it looks like you'd have to...

Terry Wriste talked about three different entrances into these cave bases,

and one of them was on Brown Mountain in North Carolina.

We could have been standing in that entrance right then.

But we couldn’t get any further,

so there was nothing much we could do.

And so again, it’s kind of like that idea of trusting

and just going with it.

Because it might sound absurd, but at the end of the day,

we were all standing in front of a cave that looked like the entrance

to what could have been an underground base,

and there was a big, huge, giant slab of rock there

stopping us from being able to get inside.

It wasn’t too long after we’d returned from all these trips

that we got an email…

from a guy who was going by the name

"Terry Wriste."

And it said,

“Why did you stop when you were so close?

I have something for you. One week.”

And it was like, weird and misspelled.

There was this really strange kind of cadence to it.

At that point, I’m like, okay, somebody is fucking with me at this point.

It was all lower-case. Everything was strange about it.

Whether or not this is involved in the original emails from David or not,

somebody is messing with me.

Because a lot of the information about the goblins

that we’d had at this point was on the internet.

Because we’d written a little post about it.

Sure enough, a week later,

another email comes in.

This one read,

“Hellier was just a symptom.

The Ink and Black are isolated still and third order MIA.

Bare in mind, for every door closed,

a window must be opened.

The door is closed. The window is open.

Use the numbers.”

Right off the bat, this one struck us

because he specifically mentions “Hellier.”

But in all of our postings, we never once released the name of David’s town.

So there’s no way he should have known that.

And the attachment was a photograph.

And it was a photograph of a slip of paper

that had a whole mess of numbers on it.

The numbers... I think there were sixteen numbers.

And, as with everything else, I put it on Facebook and I said,

“What the heck is this?”

One of my friends immediately pointed out,

“Oh that’s a credit card number.”

And I thought, oh, geez, so I should pull it down

because who knows whose credit card number this was.

That’s when somebody else pointed out:

“No, those are GPS coordinates.”

And at that point, I had this cold chill run down my spine

because when I put them into a GPS,

they actually pointed

right to where this cave was...

Or at least, the similar vicinity of this cave

in North Carolina that Micah Hanks had taken us to.

I mean, there’s literally only one or two people who should have known that,

the exact spot where we were.

That’s weird. And...

that freaked me out.

Whoever it was knew we were there at this cave.

Very few people knew where we were going or what we were doing.

As far as I know, only Micah really knew where this cave was.

It was actually really frightening

because we both kind of looked at each other like,

“what is actually going on?”

It kind of made a lot of the other stuff seem more concrete,

which in retrospect for me specifically was a bit upsetting.

The only thing that this was similar to that I could find

was letters that were sent to John Keel.

Most people know John Keel because he wrote The Mothman Prophecies.

He was the guy who popularized the Mothman sightings.

There was a lot of really weird high strangeness

that happened around that,

a lot of really strange coincidences,

and he was the guy who made that what it is.

But he had a lot of really interesting theories that I’m really into,

which are that there are window areas

and in these window areas,

things can come in and out a little more easily:

The veil is thinner.

UFOs aren’t coming from outer space, they’re coming from here,

from another dimension.

As are most of the creatures that we run into in cryptozoology,

extraterrestrials, that kind of stuff.

He used to get letters from these people

who called themselves The International Bankers.

And they came from weird postmarked places in other countries.

Sometimes they didn’t even have a postmark on them,

They were just sent through the mail without any postmarking.

Sometimes they just showed up in his mailbox.

But they were the same kind of weird misspellings,

almost purposeful misspellings of things.

But they were super direct in

“you need to stop doing what you’re doing.

You need to stop looking into what you’re looking into.”

But it was weird because this read differently.

It said “why did you stop?”

Not, “Stop.”

“Why did you stop?

Here’s GPS Coordinates.

Go find the window.

The door is closed. Go find the window.”

We continued to look around and look into this type of stuff,

and occasionally something would pop up

or someone would say,

“Oh, the story that you guys shared, something like this happened

to my grandfather, and he called them ‘the Gobsows’”

or “my grandparents used to tell me about the ‘holler goblins’ in eastern Kentucky…”

So little things kept popping up here and there,

but no matter what we would do,

we never heard back from Terry Wriste,

we never heard back from David.

Really interesting thing happened about a year and a half ago.

We got into contact with Geraldine Sutton-Stith,

who is one of the last relatives of the Sutton family

who lived in the farmhouse,

her father was Lucky, who actually shot at one of these goblins.

There’s two living relatives of hers that were present for the case,

but they refuse to talk about it.

She said that they were just made fun of way too much in the media.

So Geraldine has taken it upon herself to keep sharing stories about this

and to keep that story alive.

And I just… There was…

All this stuff with caves and the goblins...

that kept coming up: monsters in the Appalachians,

they would come out of caves,

people were meeting strange little creatures in caves…

Turns out, the Mammoth Cave System sits right below the center of Kentucky,

runs almost the stretch from Hopkinsville all the way over to Hellier,

and then all the way up through the Appalachians.

And there could be a way that this is all connected.

So I asked Geraldine and I said,

“You know, I realize this is a weird question,

do you remember at the farm house, where this stuff crashed,

and where all these sightings took place,

were there any caves nearby the farm house?

Is the farmhouse still there?

Could I come out and see it?”

The farmhouse was long gone.

The property was owned by somebody else.

And she wasn’t sure that there were any caves.

But she was really good friends with people from the town,

and she said that she would ask.

A day or two later, she got back and she goes,

“You know what’s really interesting,

there’s a big cave right next to where this thing crashed.

The cave system runs all the way through there

and connects to the Mammoth Cave system.”

And I was like, “holy cow!

This is all connected!”

But as we continued to plot these out, we started to notice that

there is a theme that occurs.

And it’s not just goblins stuff. It’s very similar stuff.

And it pops up all through the Mammoth Cave System,

all the way through the Appalachians,

even up as far as Vermont,

there are all of these stories about people seeing these things

in and around caves.

A lot of them have three-toed footprints,

a lot of them look kind of like the same type of deal,

some of them look like a variation of an extraterrestrial creature.

But they’ve all given them different names

because regionally they’d never heard of the Hopkinsville stuff,

so some of them call them Tommyknockers,

that are in the mines and get disturbed when there’s these big loud sounds,

and it sounds like dudes are mining.

So we started to think,

“What if it was never extraterrestrials to begin with?

What if it was something that was in these caves

and dwelled in these caves?”

They all fit, the whole thing fits!

The map is there,

you can look at the map, you can see

these black spots that just fit this whole trail.

From the fifties on, there have been all of these sightings

and all of these people are giving them different names

and they don’t think that they’re related because

they don’t have an option.

They don’t know that this stuff is going on.

The other thing that led us to believe

that there’s even more credibility to this theory was…

A production company that wanted to shoot this

project with us about the goblins,

it was like a one-off thing,

it was never supposed to be made for public consumption;

it was just to sell the show.

It was a sizzle reel.

They’d found the stuff that we’d written about the goblins,

and thought, “Well this is perfect.

This is just weird,

this is interesting. We’ve never seen this before.”

And they said, “Would you guys be interested

in being part of the sizzle reel?

It’s just for internal use. No one’s going to see it.

Obviously we don’t need to go out to the actual town,

Obviously we don’t need to go out to the actual town,

we’ll meet in the middle.”

Because this guy was from Tennessee.

We were like, yeah, you know, we’ll get a free adventure out of it,

it’s a weekend, they’ll feed us and put us up.

So we went down to Cave City, Kentucky.

Kind of in the middle of Kentucky. Middle of the Mammoth Cave system.

It’s one of those places where there’s lots of recreational caves

that have been roadside traps since the 50s and the 60s.

They’ve got the big dinosaurs and stuff like that everywhere.

They’re all tearing down the cameras and everything afterwards,

and there had been this little girl who was riding her bike

back and forth, seeing all the people with the cameras,

wondering what was going on.

She ended up walking over to Dana and I,

just kind of sitting there killing time while everybody was breaking down.

She said, “That man over there said you two are monster hunters.”

“You guys look for monsters!” And she was psyched and really excited.

I said, “Yeah. Why, have you seen any monsters?”

And she said, “Yeah.

My friends and I, we see them all the time.

And my parents see monsters too.”

“Are they scary? Are they under your bed?”

You know, that kind of thing.

And she says, “No! They come out of the caves!”

And I started to look around immediately,

and I was like, okay, which producer put her up to this?

Because this is a fun story twist.

Okay, which of the producers did this?

No one’s paying any attention.

They’re all just tearing down their equipment.

We’re not even wearing lav mics at this point.

So there’s no audio, there’s nothing.

We were like, “well can you draw what they look like?”

And so I scramble and found a piece of paper and got a pen

from the dude behind the counter.

And she started off by drawing their feet,

which was a random detail that initially I thought,

Okay, now I was 100% sure that a producer had put her up to it,

because the first thing she drew was a little three-toed footprint.

And kids drawing feet, they don’t just randomly draw three…

And it’s even kind of the same shape, it’s an elongated,

slender in the middle footprint, with like three bulbs on the top.

I mean, it looks like a kid’s drawing,

but it still fits what these goblin prints look like

I’m freaking out!

And at this point I’m telling everyone, “Turn the cameras on!

Turn them on! Bring them over here!

Mics or not, turn them on and watch this!”

And she started talking about how her parents were like,

“Oh yeah, they tell us not to go near the mines,

and it’s coming from this one over here,

it’s like two streets away.”

I said, “can you draw what one of these things looks like?”

And she drew, it looks like a kid’s version of a Kentucky Goblin.

There are two completely fascinating points on it

that she should not have drawn for any other reason

other than she had legitimately seen these things.

Often, the Hopkinsville Goblins, they’re often described as

having glassy, large eyes.

Very large, glassy eyes, and very weird elephant-shaped ears

that protrude from the sides of their heads.

And she nailed it. She drew both of those things.

She basically drew an alien face with those two attributes

and we were like, “There’s no way a kid would just randomly...

Number one, would draw a three-toed footprint,

but draw the face of the Hopkinsville Goblins,

there’s no reason on the planet for that.”

And at this point I freaked out.

The fact alone that this little girl,

not knowing anything about the Hopkinsville case,

not knowing anything other than we were “monster hunters,”

was able to draw, not only a three-toed footprint,

but the head of a creature that looks exactly like the Kentucky Goblins

was really strange.

And it happened smack-dab in the middle of the Mammoth Cave System.

The weight of that moment for us was just like...

Again, another one of those moments when you’re like...

It aligns everything thats already happened in a weird perspective

because you have to kind of stop and go like,

“Holy shit, that maybe actually really happened!”

It’s those moments of gravity that change the past,

and change the way that you looked at stuff.

And that keeps happening, those solidifying moments

where you can’t just go,

“Oh, it was just someone sending us a stupid email.”

Because it really doesn’t feel like it at this point.

So, we thought, after we moved to Cincinnati,

Hellier is only about 31/2, 4 hours away from here.

We’d never been there before, and thought,

“Well, we’re not doing anything,

we’ve got a free weekend,

let’s just go.

Let’s just go and let’s ask around and see what we find.”

Shocked when we got to this place,

because you can only tell so much from looking at a GPS map.

This place was totally dead.

Tiny, tiny town, with no cellphone service there, middle of nowhere.

Clearly it was like an old mining town.

They had really one store, and it was the gas station,

the grocery store, and the pizza restaurant.

And we thought, well that’s as good a place as any to start.

- I’m going to go ask about the goblins.

Dana sat in the car.

And I put a little lapel mic on.

And she shot me from inside the car.

And I went in and I just started asking people and showing them these pictures.

How’s it going?

Alright, how are you?

Not bad.

Can I ask you a weird question while I’m here?

- Sure

You ever seen anything that looks like that?

I was really nervous.

And when we got there, Greg and I were looking at each other

and going like, “this is probably a bad idea.”

And we were like, “We’ll stop at one or two places, and we’ll talk to people.”

And it just opened a whole can of worms.

What is it?

That’s what I’m trying to find out, man.

Before too long, I mean, it was not even half an hour,

there were like, a dozen, two dozen people that had shown up at this place,

because we were calling people and said, “hey there’s somebody here,

he’s investigating this weird thing.”

And everybody had some kind of story.

He’s seen bigfoot!

You’ve seen bigfoot?

Yeah.

What was it like?

Hopped off the hill,

ran across the road in just a couple of steps,

and it put its hand on the guardrail...

- No joke? - And just hopped across and was gone.

Like it turned and looked at me and then just hopped and gone.

It was, ah, I’ve never said nothing about this for, I guess years.

You know, before I’d ever seen anything.

And other people was, you know what I mean,

was saying, “hey, we’ve seen something…”

And they was describing about the same thing that I was…

It ranged anywhere from little things that were running across the street,

to people saying “oh yeah, we get weird prints on our property all the time,

I’ve got an old mine on my property,

everybody around here has old mines on their property.”

And they said, “Oh you know, it was weird because a few years ago,

there was this giant UFO.”

And it hovered above the town.

And they said it hovered there for hours and hours and hours.

And they were like, “it was as big as a jumbo jet.

This thing was massive.”

Like I said, years ago people think you was crazy.

But we’ve seen it. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it.

My whole family down there’d seen it.

We watched it. It was there all day long, right in the middle of the day.

Seems like it was in October, about two years ago.

What’s the name of the newspaper?

Appalachian News Express.

Appalachian News Express.

- Yep - Okay

It was on the front page. Thousands of people seen it.

- mmhm.

And you could see it pretty good, it was like a cylinder shape,

and it wasn’t moving, it was just there.

Wow.

Just in the same spot. And it was there for a long time, man.

All day, that day.

And it just hovered?

And it was like it must’ve been like spinning

because when it was rotating, it would catch the sun

and it would get real bright.

- No joke!

And as it was rotating, it would go away.

These images, snapped by Allan Epling

has the man stumped, and that’s saying something

coming from a long time amateur astronomer.

I know a satellite when I see it.

I track satellites with my HAM radio and the telescope.

But this object is like nothing he’s ever seen.

For 21/2 hours, he watched and photographed this object

as it hung in the air, until eventually it disappeared.

And he wasn’t alone.

Police say they received numerous calls

and Epling found other observers online.

No one knew who David Christie was, no one had any idea.

Somebody actually asked, like,

“Oh ask this guy, he’s been living here for forever,”

and this super-old dude was like,

“I’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve never heard that name.

No idea who this guy is.”

We thought okay, well let’s go see if we can find David’s house.

I mean, the town’s not big.

So we drove up this road and there was a house

sitting there on the left side of this road…

There’s an abandoned house, all grown up.

Maybe that’s David’s House.

- Oh, my gosh there’s a car back there and everything too…

- See that could be it! That could be like...

But look, it’s abandoned, it looks like it’s been abandoned...

- There’s exercise equipment on the front lawn.

- It looks like it’s been abandoned for like three years.

There’s a basketball net back there, that’s where kids would be,

Old fucking Christmas lights still up.

- There’s a shed. - There’s a fucking shed there!

- Yep

There was a stream nearby, there were caves nearby. Old mines.

And it looked like it had been abandoned for about two or three years.

Which would have been the time that David was going through all of this stuff.

The house still had stuff all on the front lawn, but no one,

clearly no one was living there at the time.

When we saw this specific house, it was like a weird...

Something was just like, “This is it.”

Like, I felt like chills almost, looking at it.

Because it was just like a family home that had been totally abandoned.

It creepily still had like kids toys, and it had the window that

would have been the window that they would have been looking in.

And all of these details that felt right.

And it felt in my gut like it was the house.

It creeped me out.

So that’s as far as we’ve gotten.

That’s as far as we’ve investigated Hellier.

I’ve often thought that it meant more…

It was more about the town, and that David was one person

who was experiencing it. And maybe he left

and our chances of getting into David’s cave are over

but it doesn’t matter because we know this caving system exists

all around that area and all up and down through Kentucky

and pretty much halfway across the country.

That’s one instance of potentially…

I don’t know, thousands of them?

So, for me I’ve often thought that it was more kind of egging us on,

like, “You need to go back. You have to go back

and start asking questions.”

So I mean, obviously we have to go.

There’s just no way around it,

we have to go.