Bigfoot Protects Ohio Family's Cattle for Generations

# The Tall One Who Waited by the Yard: An Ohio Family's 12-Year Encounter A story surfaced recently from a corner of southeastern Ohio that has stuck with me long after the video ended. It's the kind of account that reminds you just how little we know about the beings that may be sharing these woods with us, and how patient they might be. Marlene S., a 78-year-old woman who has lived on the same 140 acres in Richland Township, Guernsey County since 1979, decided it was finally time to tell her story. Her husband Lel passed in 2015, and her granddaughter convinced her that there are people out there who would want to hear it from someone who was actually there. Marlene's farm sits in the hill country south of Byesville, a few miles from Senecaville, in a landscape most folks don't picture when they think of Ohio. It's steep ridges, narrow hollows, and country that was once alive with deep mines in the early 1900s. The farm came down through Lel's side of the family. His great-grandfather Isaac came home from the war in 1865 and bought the ground a few years later. Like many farmers in that part of Appalachia, Isaac didn't just farm. He dug coal out of his own hillside, what the old-timers called a "country bank" or "farmer's bank." You'd find where a seam showed in the side of a hollow and dig straight in after it with a pick, a shovel, and a few timbers to hold the roof up. Isaac's bank was in the hollow below the house on the east side, behind a spring that runs orange from iron deposits. That spring matters later. By the time Chester, Lel's father, was about 10 years old, Isaac walked him down to the old bank one fall afternoon. The mouth had been closed for over 20 years by then, with flat rock stacked across it and dirt shoveled against it, and sumac grown up all over. But there was a gap near the top where you could feel air moving. Isaac struck a kitchen match and held it in front of that gap. The flame leaned over sideways, went small, and died. He lit another one. Same thing. "Bad air, Chester," Isaac told him. "Black damp. When the weather's turning, the old works breathe out. You don't ever sit down in this hollow on a still evening, and you don't ever let your stock bed down here." For anyone unfamiliar, black damp is very real. It's what miners called the air in old workings after the oxygen had been used up and replaced mostly by carbon dioxide. It's heavier than ordinary air, so it settles in low places. When the barometer drops, the pressure outside falls and the air trapped inside pushes out to meet it. Miners called that a "mine breathing." The flame dims and goes out in it, which is how men tested for it for a couple hundred years before anyone carried a meter. Chester asked Isaac why he'd closed the bank. Isaac only told him he'd been warned to. When Chester asked who warned him, the old man laughed a little and wouldn't say more. Chester was 10, so he let it go. Chester ran the farm after Isaac, mostly Herefords, and he kept one habit that puzzled his family for years. He never let the cows stay in the hollow pasture overnight, and after the middle of August, he didn't turn them in there at all. There was a gate at the top of the hollow where it opened into the long field, and Chester kept a chain on it with a note wired to the post in his own handwriting. The note read: "Close by dark." Just that. Lel thought it was about the black damp. He remembered his dad telling Isaac's story, and figured Chester was being careful in late summer when the evenings got still and heavy. So Lel kept the habit. Cows in the hollow on summer days, cows out by dark, gate chained. It seemed like an old man's caution, and the family went along with it like you keep using your mother's recipe without knowing why she added the extra egg. Then came the spring of 1980, and the first real trouble. Coyotes had been moving into Ohio for a while by then. When Marlene was a girl, nobody she knew had ever seen one. Chester used to swear there weren't any coyotes in Guernsey County, and in his younger days, he was probably right. But by the late 70s and into the 80s, people were starting to see them and hear them, and farmers who calved outside were starting to lose calves. Loose dogs had always been a problem too. Between the two, a new calf out in the open on a cold night had a hard time of it. Their nearest neighbor to the south was Burl Kinsey, a widower about 60 years old with a place about the size of theirs. He'd been Chester's friend for 40 years. He had a voice like gravel in a bucket, chewed Red Man, and knew more about cattle than anybody Marlene ever met. That spring of 1980, Burl started losing calves. What happened next is the part that makes this account so remarkable. The family began noticing a tall figure walking their fence line after dark. For most of the next 12 years, they believed this being was guarding their pasture from coyotes. And according to Marlene, they were right about that much. They had the rest of it wrong. Then one April night, the tall one walked up to their yard in the middle of the night and stood there waiting for them to put their boots on. Marlene and Lel followed it down into the hollow. It stopped at the mouth of a coal bank that had been sealed up since 1897. It bent over, picked up a creek stone about the size of a hen's egg, and let it drop into a crack in the ground beside its foot. Lel had the flashlight. Marlene had a fistful of the back of his barn coat. They stood there in the cold and listened to that stone go down. It clicked off rock once, then again, and then there was a long quiet, long enough that Marlene started to think it had lodged somewhere. Then they heard it hit water. Lel turned his head and looked at her. He didn't say a word, and neither did she, because they had been living on top of that sound for 12 years. So had their cows. So had their children. The video is worth the time. Marlene tells the story with the kind of plain, steady voice that makes you lean in. There's no theatrics, no attempt to convince. Just a woman who was there, telling you what happened on her own land, in her own words. The detail about the note on the gate, the orange spring, the black damp, the way the tall one waited for them to put their boots on, all of it adds up to something that doesn't fit neatly into any box. Whatever was walking that fence line knew exactly what was under that hollow, and it took 12 years to decide the family was ready to know too. If you've ever wondered whether these beings might be tied to the old workings under our feet, or whether they've been watching certain families for generations, this account will give you a lot to think about. Go give it a watch.