Shownotes Transcript
Serving in the armed forces is widely recognized as an act of courage, of patriotism, and of duty to one's country. Among other reasons, it is a career that carries with it a varying, often unpredictable, degree of risk and danger. Our story today is true, as recounted by an American veteran, once a young specialist in the United States Army. For the sake of anonymity, we will just call him
Robert. While many soldiers leave their active military service with both physical and psychological scars, in 1988, young Robert would leave the army with something more complicated. This is part one of the story of the night shift at Fort Campbell. I'm Luke LaManna and this is Wartime Stories.
I don't exactly know what the military is like these days. At least I don't know what kind of mindset soldiers have. Back in the 80s, with the Vietnam War having ended only a decade ago, it was still fresh in everyone's minds. We grew up with that war, watching it on TV and hearing about it in depth as part of our school curriculums. When I was old enough to enlist, I did. Served four years, from 84 to 88.
No matter where I was stationed though, on base, there was always a sense of honor and reverence about the Vietnam War and the soldiers who'd fought in it. Those were the good old days and we were the next group, the next in line. We were all eagerly waiting for our turn to prove ourselves. At the same time, there was an uncomfortable atmosphere lurking in the shadows, a general feeling that we were now unnecessary. This is what they call peacetime service.
Sure, we knew that on occasion some random US battalion or division got mobilized and was sent somewhere in the world. Lebanon, Grenada, and Libya to name a few. We knew that those soldiers might have seen some degree of combat, but an actual full-scale war was something we didn't see happening at that time. Why am I telling you any of this? Because during my time in the army, I had a number of strange experiences that seemed to defy explanation.
And while the stories I'm about to tell you are true, even I probably wouldn't believe them if I hadn't seen what I did. My first experience trying to report such strange events to military authorities taught me that I was better off keeping my mouth shut if I knew what was good for me. As I eventually found out, staying silent was not only good for my career, but for my safety. I should add here that I hold no resentment towards the Army for what happened to me. I enjoyed serving my country very much, and I've always been proud of it.
Still, some 30 years on, the memory of these experiences has continued to haunt me like nothing I can explain. I'm not sure why strange things kept happening to me back then. Hell, I'm not even sure if I want to know. I have often questioned my own sanity, but who on earth asks that kind of question and isn't terrified by the answer? The stories I'm going to share with you all happened between 1987 and 1988 during my time at Fort Campbell.
an army base sat right on the border of kentucky and tennessee keep in mind that this area isn't exactly unaccustomed to strange happenings a quick search on the internet will tell you that i only wish i'd known that back in the 80s i might have felt less crazy when they started happening to me campbell is just west of the cumberland plateau the same stretch of land where the infamous champ ferguson slaughtered all those people during the civil war over a century ago
The base is also less than an hour drive south from Kelly, the town where, back in the 50s, the Sutton family supposedly encountered creatures that have since become known as the Kentucky Goblins. As I say, the area has quite a unique history. I had first arrived at Fort Campbell around January of 1987, after coming off a short deployment to Central America.
I'd first been sent back to my command, the 27th Airborne Engineering Battalion, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, before being reassigned to the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell. I'll address the reasons for that reassignment later. Having grown up in Tennessee, not too far from the base, I was happy to be stationed back home, near my family, in a familiar area. At almost 165 square miles in a land area, Fort Campbell is much larger than most cities in America.
It's more than three times the size of the city of San Francisco and half the size of New York City. That helps put it in perspective. It's massive. Now, why is that important? Because unlike such large cities, the base is mostly just undeveloped land, with some of it being dedicated to rifle, grenade, and artillery ranges. As such, most of Fort Campbell, as well as the area around it, is nothing but wilderness. Hundreds of thousands of acres, dense, standing forest.
Even though my primary MOS was communications and that occupation would typically keep me inside working on radio equipment, I unexpectedly found myself spending most of my time working out in those woods at night. A few months after arriving to the base and being assigned to the 101st, I was given a temporary duty assignment to the MP Battalion, the military police. It was a nice change of pace for me. Instead of fixing busted radio equipment, I was doing security patrols around the base.
exploring much more of it than I ever thought I would have otherwise. I soon discovered that Campbell has thousands of buildings and hundreds of miles of streets and roads, with a surprising amount of those being back roads and dirt roads, reaching into the outermost sections of the base's large perimeter. One of the less desired security duties involved driving these back roads and checking on the out-of-the-way areas and inactive properties located on base. I was assigned to a night shift security detail, but on occasion, extra shift coverage was needed.
I picked up what I'd considered more than my fair share of extra night shift patrols along the back areas. Don't get me wrong, I actually enjoyed it. With the most excitement I'd had in the Army, being my recent deployment down to Central America, and with that growing sense of me being increasingly obsolete, a soldier during peacetime, pulling these night patrols made me feel like I was active military again. It made me feel like I belonged, like I had a purpose.
That, and since I grew up in the area, I felt rather at home driving on those back roads. Surrounded by nature, and being away from the lights and paved streets. The further you get from the city lights, the more of the night sky you get to see. As such, I was happy to find myself out in the backwoods in the dark, even if it was just driving pre-planned routes, shaking locked gates and such. Not everyone felt that way. Sometimes I was paired with a partner that didn't like that particular security detail.
We had city boys who hated being sent out in the woods. I found them to be somewhat hilarious in their, well, almost fear of being out on a back road miles away from any sort of developed area. I didn't mind it a bit. Well, I do admit that it did get creepy at times, being out in the woods in a pitch black dark. Honestly, that just kind of added to the experience. But these nightly patrols were mostly just quiet routine that never amounted to anything exciting.
That is, until they suddenly became terrifying. Most of the time though, it was just two guys carrying standard sidearms and rifles, driving around in either a pickup truck or SUV painted the standard OD green. Our job was to simply inspect the perimeter fences and lock gates, as well as a fair few older buildings and storage areas which contained various equipment that was seldom used. With the base being as large as it was, we'd maybe drive for a good 10 minutes between sites and
Before we'd stop to get out, walk around a bit, rattle a fence gate, yank on a locked padlock, and get back in the truck and drive to the next location. Every once in a while we might run into someone. Sometimes it might be a soldier out doing something weird at night, like meeting his lady friend out by the perimeter fence, because he was restricted to base. It was his buddy standing there watching them that weirded me out. Or the guy we found going for a midnight run, wearing nothing but his sneakers.
That guy told us running naked in the dark was some kind of religious thing. Said he was a druid. People think I'm strange. Other times it was the occasional teenaged army brat trying to spray graffiti on the old buildings. Sometimes we'd find clear signs of trespassers. Old campfires, cut fence, stuff like that. It was rare, but there was also the occasional homeless guy that would break into the buildings that had electricity.
There was hardly anything valuable in most of the buildings, but we'd still occasionally find broken windows and evidence of people trying to break in to steal something. With the off chance that we might run into some unknown person, I felt a lot more apprehensive when we were checking these locations, the ones with the buildings. Plenty of places for people to hide in the dark. Above all, there was one location that was creepy as all hell, even in the daytime, and we had to check it every night.
It was a very large, rectangular, fenced-in lot, filled with a number of old cars and a few storage buildings. When soldiers deploy for 7 to 14 months, if they don't have a house, they usually need to move their stuff out of the barracks into storage. If they have a car, since the base doesn't want a bunch of unused vehicles filling up parking spots, that also goes into storage.
along with a few newer pieces of heavy military equipment and army vehicles. This particular lot was filled with a bunch of very old and rusted out cars, the worst of which had license plates dating back to the early 70s. Practically all the civilian cars were in bad shape, all the tires being long since dry-rodded and flat, the car's interior slowly crumbling to dust. We were told the vehicles likely belonged to guys that deployed to Vietnam, but never came back. Either KIA or MIA.
and whose families never claimed them, so they were apparently left here and forgotten about. I'm not sure if the army was trying to keep the cars safe from damage by storing them here, but I imagine that after 15 years, nobody could expect them to do much about it. But sadly, this location was a prime target for vandals and thieves, which our security patrol was supposed to prevent.
That and several of the buildings and garages were clearly still in current use for long-term storage of various gear and equipment, which is why we had to inspect it every night. The lot was fairly big, could probably fit two dozen football fields inside of it, and was surrounded by a 12-foot high fence topped with barbed wire. Usually, we'd just drive around the perimeter and look in through the chain-link fence to check for anything unusual. One night in June, though, as we were driving by the section where all the old cars were parked,
The guy driving the truck that night, my buddy Wireman, suddenly said he saw somebody moving around inside the fence. "Oh, did you see that?" "See what?" "That, right there." He stopped the truck and pointed out the silhouette he had seen. There probably wasn't a lot of moonlight that night as it took me a moment to make out what he was pointing to. Before I even knew what I was looking at, it moved. I couldn't help but notice, whoever or whatever it was, it was fast.
My first thought was that it probably wasn't an animal. That, and something that big, like a bear, wouldn't have been able to get up over that tall fence unless it found a decent sized hole in it somewhere. Our truck had two spotlights mounted above the side mirrors, like police cars do. We swung those around to try and get the light on whatever it was, but it was a good distance inside the fence line, and every time we got close with the light it would move again, or duck down behind the cars.
From what little we could see, it certainly seemed agile, able to continue moving even while crouched down, and smart enough to stay out of the light. Definitely not an animal. As was our protocol, while Wireman kept his spotlight moving, I radioed in that we were investigating a possible security breach at the location. I wasn't sure what to tell him, but I figured it would be something minor, like teenagers out causing trouble or such. If not teenagers, we weren't all too excited about stumbling upon yet another would-be thief,
vandal or homeless person. That was always rather an overdrawn matter because it would usually be some civilian that we'd have to eventually turn over the local police. Annoying, but we still had a job to do. We drove a short distance, pulling the truck off the road when we reached the nearest gate. I got out of the truck and walked up to the gate, ready to unlock the padlock. I had my flashlight in my left hand and my key ring in my right. It took me a while to find the correct key since there were dozens on the key ring.
probably one for every damn lock on the entire base. I must have tried half of them to get the lock open. As I did so, I kept looking up and moving my flashlight from having it shining down on the lock and pointing back through the fence towards where we had seen the intruder. I realized I couldn't see a damn thing because the truck's headlights were pointed right at the back of my head and the surrounding light made the darkness that much worse. Wireman had opened his door and gotten out and was standing behind it.
He had his window down, using his right hand to operate the spotlight and sweeping his flashlight across the fence with his left. When I finally got the padlock open, I pulled away the chain and began swinging the right side of the gate open. Glancing back at the truck, I saw Wireman climb back into the driver's seat as he prepared to drive the truck inside. So I started to walk through the gate ahead of him. A loud, long, blood-curdling shrill of a scream suddenly erupted some distance ahead of me.
piercing the silence of the night. Now, I'd been raised in the country, and in all my years of hiking outdoors, sleeping in the woods on camping trips, I'd never heard a sound as terrifyingly bone-chilling as that. And it sure as hell didn't sound human. I don't know what was going through Wireman's mind, but a cold chill swept down through my body. I felt my muscles tighten as the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I realized that I'd frozen in place, and mid-step. I believe it was at that moment that my fight-or-flight instinct tried to kick in.
The dark expanse before me seemed to come into extreme focus. What I'm about to say probably doesn't make sense, but I can't put it in any other words. Everything in front of me was now either solid black or it wasn't. The entirety of my field of vision, the cars, the buildings, transformed into countless silhouettes of different shades of black. The area ahead of me seemed to stretch and expand back into the distance. Realizing what was happening, I tried to fight back against this sudden onset of tunnel vision.
Hearing my own heartbeat in my ears, I took a few careful steps backward away from the open gate. I forced my eyes to the right and left, trying to concentrate, trying to see anything that might be hiding out in the darkness in front of me. Although I wasn't sure what that scream was, I knew then that I was absolutely terrified. More of the ungodly screams erupted in rapid succession from other nearby locations inside the fenced lot. My mind started to reel, trying and failing to make sense of the utter strangeness of the situation.
But the army drills your training into your brain for a reason: to keep you focused on the matter at hand. At his most stressed, every soldier will default to his most basic level of training. I guess you could say I instantly began to analyze the situation, had there been five or six screams. These screams meant that there were more out there, but how many? And how many more were out there that hadn't screamed? I realized that whoever they were, whatever they were, they outnumbered us, and probably by a significant amount. I could just feel it.
that they were watching me right at that moment, as I stood blindly in the illumination of the truck's headlights. I cursed myself for being an easy target. All of this had happened in a matter of a few seconds. Instinctively, I shoved the key ring against the flashlight in my left hand and drew my pistol with my right. Wireman had apparently been watching me, and he quickly stepped back out of the truck. He drew his pistol as well, pointing it out into the darkness in the general direction where the screams had come from.
I kept easing back away from the gate, scanning the area as I closed the short distance to the passenger side of the truck. We heard another scream, seeming to come from the same location as the first. At the same time, out in the darkness, something suddenly stood up. My first thought was that it was too tall, the cars around it only reaching its waist level. It stood motionless for a long moment, then it lunged forward. It was quickly closing the hundred yards between us.
I finally felt my legs underneath me again. Wireman and I both scrambled to get back inside the truck. Wireman cut the wheel hard to the left, get the truck pointed back towards the road, punch the gas pedal. The tires barked momentarily and off we went. We certainly could have fired on it in self-defense, but even as terrified as it was, something in my mind must have still entertained the slim possibility. This could just be a few mentally unstable homeless people, or maybe some drunk teenagers. I could not have been more wrong.
The road ran parallel to the fence line with only about a 6 foot gap between the two. As we picked up speed, I glanced back to my right. My heart nearly jumped out of my body. The damn thing was now running alongside the truck, right on the other side of the fence, probably only 10 feet away from us, and it was massive. Instinctively, I swung my flashlight on it through the open window. I'm not sure what I thought, it sure as hell wasn't a man, but it was running upright on two legs.
I knew how tall I was compared to that 12-foot fence. 6 feet 2 inches. This thing must have been at least 8 feet in height, if not more. It was covered in short, very dark brown hair. The top of its head was tall and rounded, distinctly not human. Its face was also very brown, but it was also shiny, as if it were skin, not hair. But I can't be positive. It had a distinct mouth and nose. It didn't have a snout like a bear, nor did it have a flat nose or face like a gorilla.
It ran very fast, not slow and wobbly like a bear. It was unlike any animal I'd ever seen. It had a distinctively thick, wide pelvis and big hips. Its legs were stocky and seemed somewhat short in comparison to the size of its upper body. Aside from being upright on two legs, it didn't run like a man would. It kept its upper body stiff, with maybe only a slight rocking motion from side to side, and it didn't swing its arms.
Even as we accelerated, the creature was able to keep up with the truck, running all out, its legs pumping furiously. Clearly, it was very strong. Only sheer brute strength could be pushing it forward at that speed. It was loud, too. I could hear its heavy breathing, even over the truck's engine, and the sound of the tires on the old road. It made a loud and deep grunting noise as it ran, as if it were moving a huge volume of air through its lungs. With my flashlight on it, I realized it wasn't watching where it was running. It was looking right at me.
and it looked pissed. Its eyes didn't reflect the beam of my flashlight like a deer's would, but I couldn't be sure. Also, I'd swear it had whites of its eyes, like a human. Motherf- As Wireman shouted, I came back to my senses, again feeling the adrenaline hit my brain and body. I quickly looked over at him, expecting to see another one running along his side of the truck. Instead, his face was frozen in shock and disbelief, like mine probably was, as he kept glancing back at the creature through my window and back at the road.
The chase had begun only a few seconds earlier, and we were now finally traveling fast enough to pull away from it and leave it behind. Turning back to watch it, a new surge of fear and astonishment hit me. The damn thing suddenly leapt high up onto the fence, a twelve-foot fence, and managed to sling itself over, making it look easy. But instead of landing on its feet, it crumpled to the ground, landing in a heap. It must have gotten itself caught on the barbed wire, I thought. Still trying to look backward, with my head only slightly out of the open window, I saw it struggling to stand up.
He seemed to be fighting with something, most likely having pulled the barb wire down off the top of the fence. We drove on down the road for a time, neither of us saying a word. Should we call this in? What the hell are we gonna tell him? More out of instinct than anything, Wireman just kept driving on to the next location on our patrol route. Despite what had just happened, we both knew we'd have to continue with our assignments. Neither of us wanted to say so, but we also knew we'd have to return at some point to re-secure the gate that I'd left wide open.
When we finally radioed in as we arrived to the next location, we were asked why we had to inform them that we were finished with the previous one, and they asked us for an update on the possible intruder. I made up an excuse that the radio hadn't been working properly, said it was nothing, and that we'd have the radio checked when we returned back to the station. Much later, after the sun finally came up, we went back to secure the open gate. As if confirming that two grown men couldn't possibly have the same hallucination, we found the barbed wire that had been pulled down off the fence.
exactly where the thing had jumped over it. Feeling somewhat braver in the daylight, we drove through the open gate, choosing this time to remain inside the truck with our pistols drawn, just in case. After driving around and giving the area a slow and thorough security sweep, we couldn't find any trace of whatever we'd seen earlier. Wireman drove us back outside the gate, I quickly re-secured it with the padlock and chain, and we drove back to the station. I already knew that we couldn't report anything at all about the incident. Not a word.
As I say, my previous experience told me that the Army doesn't look kindly on soldiers who start seeing things that most people never have. Wireman seemed to agree with me and said he'd never mention it to anyone either. I'm not sure if he ever did, but I'm probably not the only one of us still haunted by the experience. At the station we reported that we'd found the damaged barbed wire on the fence, but made no mention of how it got that way. Haven't had the last 30 odd years to mull it over. If I'd been alone that night,
I might have been able to convince myself it didn't happen, but it did. So in my mind, there's always been the question of what it was that we actually saw. The term Bigfoot has unfortunately become something of a disreputable term over the years, depending on who you talk to. But then again, it seems like some people wouldn't even believe the truth if it was right in front of them. For the life of me, I wouldn't know what else to call it except that, a group of Bigfoot, maybe a family of them.
Whatever they were, sometimes I'd wonder if they were just passing through the area or if that was now a part of their established territory. That question bothered me to no end. I still had to inspect that old junk lot every night. There was never another night where I felt less than terrified having to go back there. Also, if that was a Bigfoot, I've often wondered why one of them chose to confront us instead of just simply running away, like most of the stories you hear. Most reported Bigfoot encounters never seem to indicate that they are very aggressive.
Then again, maybe that's why those accounts are the only ones being reported. I've spent a fair amount of time listening to other stories, the ones about people going missing in the woods while hiking or camping. It sends that familiar chill down my spine to consider what might have happened to those people, if not the obvious. That thought haunts me the most. Had I been alone, or if that thing had managed to get to us, I've often wondered just how bad that night might have gone.
I'll probably never know the answers to these and many more questions that race through my mind at night when I'm lying in bed trying to fall asleep.
Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke LaManna. Executive produced by Mr. Ballin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt. Written by Jake Howard and myself. Audio editing and sound design by me, Cole Lacascio, and Whit Lacascio. Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stidham. Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan. Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain.
Production supervision by Jeremy Bone. Production coordination by Avery Siegel. Additional production support by Brooklyn Gooden. Artwork by Jessica Clarkson-Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picotta. If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story, you can email me at info at wartimestories.com. Thank you so much for listening to Wartime Stories.
