Thursday, June 20, 2019

Monsters and Pike Counties



Missouri

Pike County is a county on the eastern border of the U.S. state of Missouri, bounded by the Mississippi River. As of the 2010 census, the population was 18,516. Its county seat is Bowling Green. Its namesake was a city in middle Kentucky, a region from where many early migrants came. The county was organized December 14, 1818, and named for explorer Zebulon Pike. The folksong "Sweet Betsy from Pike" is generally thought to be associated with Pike County, Missouri.




Pike County is said to be the home of Momo (The Missouri Monster). The first reported sightings by the Terry Harrison family, in the 1970s, were traced to various locations throughout the county, especially at Louisiana, Missouri. During 2019, the film production company of Small Town Monsters has released MOMO: The Missouri Monster.

The melodrama that unfolded at Louisiana, Missouri, continued in 2010, regarding the kidnapping of Alisa Maier ~ a granddaughter of the Harrison family. (See here and here.)

Pike County (next to Lincoln County) is well-known for Bigfoot and UFO sightings.



Kentucky



Pike County is a county located in the U.S. state of Kentucky. As of the 2010 census, the population was 65,024. Its county seat is Pikeville. The county was founded in 1821. Pike County was founded on December 19, 1821. The county was named for General Zebulon Pike, the explorer who discovered Pikes Peak. Between 1860 and 1891 the Hatfield-McCoy feud raged in Pike and in bordering Mingo County, West Virginia. On May 6, 1893, Pikeville officially became a city and the county seat.

Hellier is an unincorporated community and coal town in Pike County, Kentucky, United States. A post office was established in the community in 1906, and named for Ralph Augustus Hellier, the head of a Pike County coal mining company.



Hellier was featured in an independent documentary called Hellier. It is a five part series that follows the investigation and research of the Kentucky goblins. Dana & Greg Newkirk, owners of The Travelling Museum of the Paranormal and the Occult, lead the investigation, along with Conner James Randall and Karl Pfieffer.

Hellier can be seen on hellier.tv and YouTube.

Georgia


The famed 1997 Elkins Creek cast is well-known in the Bigfoot community. It was found in Pike County, Georgia. 

According to Cliff Barackman, of the five prints found, the track from which "the cast was obtained [was found] near Double Bridges Road. Elkins Creek is over 8 miles to the north of this road, but apparently in between these two locations are thick woods and not much else. It seems that the southern border of Pike County more or less follows the course of Elkins Creek, so it can be reasonably assumed that it was found somewhere along that stretch north of Sprewell Bluff State Park and Wildlife Management Area."


Ohio

Pike County is a county located in the Appalachian region of the U.S. state of Ohio. As of the 2010 census, the population was 28,709. Its county seat is Waverly. The county is named for explorer Zebulon Pike.

In the Winter of 1987, near a trailer on Chenoweth Fork Road, there was "A tale of a Bigfoot sighting in Pike County," Ohio.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What about towns named Pikeville? I grew up in Pikeville, Tennessee. Are all the Pike Counties and Pikevilles named after Zebulon Pike? I thought some of the Pike-places were named after Albert Pike but that was just a guess. These places used to be full of Masons.

Loren Coleman said...

Pikeville, Kentucky was mentioned. All the variants of all names are always in play, needless to say. What strange phenomenon has been historically associated with Pikeville in Tennessee?


Most of the Pikes (including Pikeville) have been named after the explorer Zebulon, not the Masonic organizer Albert Pike.

Anonymous said...

Strange phenomena -- hmmm, well, my father saw a green ghost light on his farm in Beaty Cove, a few miles from Pikeville back in the 70's, in a place called Beaty Cove. We wrote about it and sent it into Fortean Times and they printed in their "It Happened to Me" column about 10 or so years ago (it was called "Tennessee Ghost Light".) I'll check on the issue number if you want to know.

A couple of years before that, in the sixties, there was a minor UFO flap that also involved this green light, or a similar one, in the very same area. It was very bright, seen from two miles away according to my father, and the sheriff and rescue teams were dispatched to the mountainside because they thought it was a plane crash. But they found nothing. A high school friend driving on the East Valley Road with her nephew about 1968 saw a classic brightly lit UFO which caused her pickup truck to die after it landed in front of her, and schoolchildren who lived in Beaty Cove around this time saw a silvery UFO in a field from the school bus. My friend told me that men from the Air Force, or in uniform, approached her - on a school day -- at a popular drive-in next to the school where we used to hang out, during lunch time, and told her never to talk about her sighting. But she still told me, so I guess it didn't work. It's been many years since I spoke to her but I've never forgotten her story.

Pikeville is located in Bledsoe County, which used to be called "Bloody Bledsoe" because of the number of murders. There were supposed to be ghosts associated with the murders, some of which took place in the middle of town on Main Street in the 1920's and 30's. Beaty Cove was named after one of the people supposedly involved in the street shootings in Pikeville, and my father supposed that the green light he saw might have been his ghost, since he had that very day picked up pieces of Mr. Beaty's moonshine still where they still lay in the ruins of Beaty's farmhouse, and carried them to his cabin nearby.