West Virginia Mine Rescue Team Encounters Something Terrifying in 2006

There's a video that crossed my feed recently from the YouTube channel Weekly Terror, and honestly, it stopped me in my tracks. It's the kind of story that sits with you long after the video ends, the kind that makes you glance out the window a little longer than usual before bed. The video tells the story of a four-man mine rescue team that walked into a sealed portal on the backside of a mountain in Boone County, West Virginia, on the morning of February 19, 2006. The portal had been grouted shut and boarded over in 1987. For nineteen years, nobody had gone past the timber. There was no reason to. The team was led by Captain Ronnie Sipple, a 49-year-old veteran who'd been going underground since he was seventeen. Behind him were Dell Farmer (38), Gary Comms (44), and the youngest, 26-year-old Junior Muny, who had a wife and baby girl waiting for him in Danville. Four men went in. Only two came back out. Within four days, the state had a contractor back on that hillside pumping grout into the portal and stacking crushed rock across the mouth until there was nothing left to see but a scar in the mountain. The paperwork that eventually surfaced called the whole thing an unauthorized entry by trespassers. But there's an incident narrative on file with the mine safety agency, and the annex attached to it is redacted. The pages exist. The words on them are blacked out in long unbroken bars, the way words get hidden when somebody decides the public is better off not reading them. What follows in the video is the account of one of the two men who walked back out into the daylight that afternoon. He carried it for a long time before he said any of it out loud. The video spends a good amount of time laying out the history of that mountain, and this is where things get really interesting for anyone who follows Sasquatch reports in Appalachia. The hillside had a name in the hollows below it, and it wasn't a good one. Locals didn't run dogs above the old rail grade. A fellow named Carl Atkins heard knocking coming off the highwall above the sealed portal in 1994, knocking followed by an answer from somewhere further along the face. He came down that mountain so fast he laid his four-wheeler into a locust tree and carried the scar the rest of his life. Two brothers with good hunting dogs had a night up on that grade where the dogs sat down at a certain point and refused to go on. The dogs weren't scared exactly. They were waiting, ears up, looking at a piece of dark woods where there was nothing to look at. The men went home and never hunted that side of the mountain again. Then there's Vernon Hatfield's mother, who lived up on the ridge road. Three separate times across the '90s, she called her son to say there was a tall man standing at the treeline across her back field in the evening, standing, not walking, watching the house. By the time Vernon drove up, it was gone every time, and there were never any tracks because the ground was leaves and rock. She wasn't a foolish woman. She stopped calling him about it after the third time and started keeping the curtains drawn on that side of the house. An old moonshiner named Odell Blevvens told the narrator's grandfather near the end of his life that he had made an arrangement with whatever lived up there. He left food on a flat rock at the head of his hollow, meat when he had it. In the years he did that, nothing ever touched his still and nothing ever touched his dogs. On three separate nights, he woke to find the meat gone and something sitting on the rock where the meat had been laid out. Once it was a string of trout gutted, though Odell had no creek nearby that held trout. Once it was a double handful of black walnuts hulled, which is slow, patient work for human hands, and Odell didn't think the hands that did it were human. And once it was a man's pocketknife, old, bone handle worn smooth, a knife Odell recognized because it had belonged to a fellow who'd gone up that mountain squirrel hunting two autumns before and never come down. Odell kept that knife in a drawer and would not carry it and would not throw it away. When he died, it went in the ground with him. A state road crew worker named Harold Estep pulled night watchman duty in 1998 and wrote in his statement that around 2:00 a.m., he watched something come down off the mountain and stand at the edge of the light from the work lamps, tall, on two legs, and stand there a long time doing nothing, just watching the parked machines and the man watching it back. Estep quit the road crew inside the month. The deer left that hillside. That's the kind of thing that doesn't make a story on its own, but the men who hunted it noticed. The sign just moved off year by year until there wasn't any reason to walk up there with a rifle anymore. Animals will give a piece of ground to whatever they think owns it, and they won't tell you why, and they're usually right. The video then explains why the team was there at all. A monitoring contractor doing subsidence work in the district picked up a reading off that dead portal that wasn't supposed to be possible. A sealed drift mine is a closed box. The air inside it goes stale and stays stale. But the instruments were showing air movement at the sealed face, in and out slow, like the mountain was breathing through a seal that had been solid for nineteen years. On top of that, there was a methane ping, which on a sealed mine is a real safety concern because if the seal has failed, you've got explosive gas venting into open woods. It wasn't a rescue. There was nobody alive in there to rescue. It was a verification. Go up, confirm the state of the seal, take readings, document the condition, recommend a reseal if the old one had failed. Routine confined space work, the kind of thing a rescue team gets sent to do a dozen times a year and never thinks about again. But the old maps put a cold spot in the narrator's chest before they ever left the truck. The closure file from 1987 was short, two pages, and it had a note that the 1987 closure crew had come up one man short. A man named Roy Sturgil had reportedly stepped off into an old winze, an interior shaft in bad light, and his body had not been recovered because the winze was flooded and unstable. They sealed the mine with him in it. The video cuts off there, mid-sentence, and honestly, that's the part that'll get you. The story is being told by a survivor, someone who kept the count, someone who walked back out into the daylight that afternoon. The annex pages are redacted. The state resealed the mountain within four days. Two men went in and didn't come back out, and the official paperwork calls them trespassers. For anyone who's spent time in Appalachia, none of this sounds far-fetched. West Virginia has a long, quiet history of encounters with tall, bipedal figures in the woods, and the regional folklore around Boone County and the surrounding hollows is full of stories that get passed down in low voices between family members. The food offerings, the tall figure at the treeline, the dogs that refuse to go on, the deer that simply leave, the knocking in the woods that sounds like an answer to a call, these are patterns that researchers have documented across the continent for decades. The Appalachian Sasquatch, sometimes called the Woodbooger or simply "the old one" by old-timers, has been part of mountain life for as long as anyone can remember. The video is worth your time. It's long, it's slow, and it's told in the voice of a man who was there. Watch it with the lights on, maybe, and pay attention to the parts that line up with the record, and the parts that line up only with the parts of the record nobody is allowed to read.