YEAR: 1971

SEASON: Summer

STATE: Kentucky

COUNTY: Jefferson County

LOCATION DETAILS: Pleasure Ridge Park, Kentucky (Jefferson County). Area south of Louisville and closest to Shively, Kentucky. The nearest main road would be Dixie Highway.

NEAREST TOWN: Shively

NEAREST ROAD: Dixie Highway

OBSERVED: There is not a lot to this incident, other than it occurred several (two or three) times over a summer. I was around 10 years old, and had all but forgotten these incidents in the following quarter century. Listening to the HOWL.WAV of the Ohio Bigfoot struck a real responsive chord. If I had to try and duplicate the sound that was heard, that would be as close as I could come.

Oh, you may have figured out by this time, we heard a sound. This was in a small, lower middle-class community that was not quite suburbs, not quite farms. Most houses sat on plots of land that were an acre or more. Though there were clusters of them that were spaced more like a regular neighborhood. Over that particular summer, the area was spooked by several nights of "howling". No sightings, that I recall, no tracks, just a low, moaning howl. My mother called me out of the house one night, to see if I could identify the source of this noise. I listened, it was fairly far off and difficult to hear and, of course, every dog in the area was putting their two cents in...and there were a lot of dogs... But it was like nothing I had ever heard before or since. As I said, the Ohio recording comes very close, other than there was maybe more or a moaning quality to what we heard. The serenade went on for five or six minutes, I remember it fading, not just cutting off. Almost as if whatever was howling was moving away from my ear-shot. I'll admit, I was ten years old and it scared the hell out of me. My father worked nights and I was "The Man" of the house when he was away...and I was frightened...

The performance repeated a week or so later, this time the howling was closer...A neighbor said he'd pinpointed the source as coming from the flood wall at the end of our road. This was a large, mounded ridge that ran the length of the area and kept the Ohio River from flooding the farmland when it over-flowed its banks. On the other side of the ridge was a VERY deep, fairly thickly wooded "ditch" area. A creek ran through the area that was maybe twelve feet across and three feet deep in places. Forgive my rambling, I am typing all this as it comes to me. I have never sat and sorted this out...

The howls came back again at least once, later in the summer. The neighbors were spooked by these incidents, as I said, but I don't believe anything ever came of it. There might have been a local news report on them, but I can't swear to it.

Thanks for the opportunity to share this story. Hope it is of some use. Actually, I am hoping someone in particular is drawn to this sight and reads and recognizes this. Friends fade over time, but best friends are eternal. I'd like to talk to him again. :)

OTHER WITNESSES: I think my mother was feeding the dogs. I was, more than likely, watching television.

TIME AND CONDITIONS: This would have been the summer of 1971, I believe. I remember the movie "The Legend of Boggy Creek" being released the following summer and we were impressed by the way the creature in the film howled in a similar way to the sounds we'd heard the previous summer.

ENVIRONMENT: I described a lot of this above, but Pleasure Ridge Park is a low-lying area, often described as a valley, with Louisville being highlands. There is a lot of farmland but now, 25 or so years later, suburbia has taken most of this over. I no longer live in the area, but the neighborhood is mostly unchanged. The flood wall is still there, but the creek has been dug out and concreted so it is now a huge, concrete gutter that runs for miles.