Goblins of Eastern Kentucky

A powerful flood brings things once buried to the surface in the Appalachian Mountains. Happy Spooky Season Snap Nation!!! It's a Halloween tradition to feature our evil twin, Spooked https://spookedpodcast.org. Spooked has all new episodes this October... explore Season 11, "The Spooked Field Guide to the Shadow." Be afraid. Big thanks to Lora Smith, Beau Morgan, and Gwen Johnson sharing your stories with us. If you want to know more about the goblins in Eastern Kentucky… Lora wrote a wonderful piece about them for Oxford American https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-130-fall-2025/gobsmacked. Scouted & produced by Zoë Ferrigno, original score by Doug Stuart, art by Teo Ducot. Season 17 - Episode 48 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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  When I was little, my bedroom had laminated wood paneling with the swirls and the rings like a real piece of wood. And if I squinted at this fake wood paneling in just such a way, I could make out eyes, the line there, a nose. I could almost see faces and a kind of smile, a long stare. And when I dialed them in just right, I heard voices.

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  Not words exactly, not full thoughts, but voices, voices talking to, I don't know exactly, but they or it understood I was there, listening. I knew of course to keep this my own little secret. And later, when I saw shades, shadows surrounding certain people, certain places, I kept silent about that as well.

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  But sometimes those voices grew loud.

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  Loud enough to wake me from a deep sleep, loud enough for me to marvel that the whole house didn't hear, the whole neighborhood. I wanted it to stop, so I pretended that I didn't hear anything at all. That it wasn't real. That there was nothing to see, that my parents and my pastor and my teachers were right. What are you looking at? They said.

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  What is wrong with you? They said.

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  What is wrong with me?

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  I wanted as well. Until I hated me too. First for my mind playing tricks on me, then for pretending, for lying that I didn't see what I saw, didn't hear what I heard, couldn't feel what I felt. So you have to understand.

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  This day, I'm leading a shuffling man into my grandmother's house through the living room, the kitchen, out onto the back stoop like she told me. And she sees me then staring, not at him, but at the shadow around him. The swirl of darkness buzzing about him, devouring him. She whispers to me.

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  You see it, don't you?

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  Don't you?

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  And it feels like a slap, like a betrayal, hot rage, fury at her. Since staring at the swirls on the wood paneling, I told myself it was not real. Told myself I was crazy, was broken, was foolish. And now here, all this time later, casually, casually, she says that I'm not.

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  I never talked back to my granny, never, ever, never. But now finally I scream, why? Why didn't you tell me? Why?

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  Why?

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  Her eyes are yellow.

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  She looks back at me with her yellow eyes and says, baby, I didn't know you were lost.

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  And so many of you, of us out there have wandered alone, questioning yourself, pretending what you know to be true is a lie.

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  And what you know to be a lie is the truth.

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  No more. We proudly present The Spooked Field Guide to the Shadow. A map, a path, breadcrumbs through the void for those of us lost, facing monsters we pretend not to see.

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  Chapter one, The Spooked Field Guide to the Shadow, starts now.

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  We begin in eastern Kentucky, and this is hollow ground, literally. Starting in the late 1800s, the mountains in eastern Kentucky were dug up and carved out for coal mines. For a lot of people who are from eastern Kentucky, mining is part of their story. It's how they put down roots, it's how they supported their families. There is a pride here, but also a cost. Because to dig out these mines, layers of protective rock and soil must be removed. And for a while, the scientists, the climate activists have been trying to warn those in

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  power about how mining has left the land vulnerable to weather, to flooding.

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  And in 2022, their worst predictions came true. The flooding that swept through the region caused massive destruction in eastern Kentucky, in Virginia, in West Virginia. Forty-five people lost their lives.

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  Our story begins in the days directly after the flood, as members of the community come together in incredible ways to care for each other.

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  Spooked.

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  My name's Beau Morgan and I'm a paramedic. I've been doing disaster relief work on and off since 2016. I was living here in Knoxville. I went up like the day after the floods hit to try and make contact with a coworker's family that had gotten missing. I left around seven or eight in the morning and would have left earlier, but it was so stormy. I brought clean drinking water.

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  I brought a ton of medical supplies, baby diapers, formula. I ended up getting a bunch of oxygen tanks from some National Guardsmen to get up to the old miners who have like emphysema and black lung and, you know, they rely on oxygen tanks to get by. On the way up there, I saw not very many cars coming in the other direction and I felt a bit on edge because I've driven into other disaster zones before where it's a bad sign if people aren't able to flee.

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  I started seeing some of the smaller mudslides along the side of the highway and where some of the tops of the mountains had come down through the forest. And there were almost like little snaking paths where the mud had cut. You can see the houses washed out and smashed into each other down in the gullies. A lot of those mines up there, you know, they don't get filled in properly and they don't replant trees or anything to hold the ground in place. So there were just tons of mudslides and water coming down off the mountains and it kind of just filled up eastern Kentucky like a bowl.

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  And it was still raining so hard. My wipers were going as fast as they could. I'd been driving on this road for a while and the rain had finally let up, but the roads were bad. And so I'd been kind of driving slow. And I think I see something on the side of the road.

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  I'm really looking at this thing, this little pile, and it's kind of taking shape. It looks like flesh. It looks, you know, it's got identifiable limbs and, you know, my brain's just automatically like, this is a kid, like this is a little toddler in the ditch. I just feel immediately like I need to bear witness, I guess, to whatever it is. Because it's, you know, clearly not alive, but it's something that could have been.

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  So I pulled over real quick and got out of the truck and I looked at this thing in the ditch about, I don't know, maybe like a foot and a half, a little bigger, not very big. It had these like huge ears and these like long fingers. They're so long and skinny and its legs are real skinny.

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  It kind of had like a bib thing on, like a baby bib, but it was kind of leathery. You know, my like hair stands on end and I'm starting to feel a little freaked out because I'd never seen anything like that before. I did have the thought of like, this looks like, I'm not a big Harry Potter fan, like I don't care about that, but I was like, this looks just like Dobby from Harry Potter.

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  And it really did, like it had little hairs and its big ears. But I don't really believe in stuff like that. And so I was really trying to rationalize it. Maybe it's like a baby deer that got mangled up in the, in the floods. I was also just kind of in that emergency mindset where you gray tag someone that has a non-survivable injury and you move on to the next situation and try and be of service there. And so I decide like, I'm not going to mess with this.

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  You know, I need to keep going. I was just drawn to getting to the folks that I was trying to help. But it was just too, too strange to stop thinking about. I was just like, don't lose your before you even get to the spot.

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  Driving into downtown Hazard, there's just debris everywhere and like metal scraps. There's a, a mobile home that's been mangled and is pushed up against the side of a riverbank. I also saw a Ford, like F-150, like a very large pickup truck, you know, turned on its side. Seeing those things, it created such a, a deep bodily reaction for me of just kind

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  of terror. Realizing that the water came so fast that it could push an entire home off its foundation or move a truck as though it was like a leaf. And just the force of that and how scary that is. I just had this real, just this ache. People died, people were dead, people lost everything. And these places that were so familiar to me, where I'd driven through, you know, countless times were unrecognizable.

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  Our story continues right after the break. Stay tuned.

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  Snapers, we are so delighted you could join an annual Snap Judgment tradition, where we explore stories of the unexplained from our evil twin podcast, Spooked, The Goblins of Eastern Kentucky, already in progress.

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  I'm Laura Smith. I grew up in southeastern Kentucky. I grew up in a place called Whitley County, where my dad's side of the family has been for, I think, over 200 years. I know I was the seventh generation to be born in that county.

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  I was working in Hazard, Kentucky for a local community foundation. So, you know, would stop in and see folks, and everybody was playing different roles. So, we had partners who were feeding people, to helping people connect to shelter, to providing childcare, to working on, you know, mutual aid networks to get people food, cleaning supplies, you know, basic necessities, water. Many of the communities didn't have water at that point still.

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  It was really, really, really bad.

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  Then, two weeks after the flood happened, there was already an event planned in Knoxville, Tennessee. It's this big gathering of artists and cultural bearers and arts and culture organizations throughout central Appalachia, and they were having their annual convening. So, I went with folks from Hazard, and it was a nice break from being inside the disaster.

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  It also is just very jarring, you know, when you've been in this like really intense kind of go-go-go urgency overwhelming situation. And the organizers of the event acknowledging what was happening in eastern Kentucky, put together this quiet room. And I go in and lay down.

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  I have a friend who's in there. There was soft music playing. They had a water sculpture that had like the sound of running water. There was just like all of these different plants around, really soothing environment, like a soft kind of low light. I'm laying down with my head on a pillow and have pulled a blanket over myself, and I'm just kind of quieting my mind.

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  My friend is laying near me, and out of kind of nowhere, says to me, "So, have you heard about these goblins?"

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  My first thought when she asked that is that I must have misheard what she said. I lift up my head and look at her. I'm just like, "What?"

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  She says, "People have been seeing goblins." And she says, "My neighbors saw some on the side of the road while they were out checking on people."

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  I am completely hooked now. I'm not quite still registering what she's saying or what she's talking about, but I just wanted to know everything.

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  She said they were driving down US 15. They were out checking on people in the days after the flood, and they saw these two small figures that they think are toddlers on the side of the road. One was standing up and wearing what they called the kilt that looked homemade. One was sitting down and kind of rocking with its hands on its head, like looking very distressed.

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  And so, they slowed down because it wasn't out of the question that there were two children that could have gotten separated from their parents, right, and were on the side of the road looking for help.

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  So, they slowed the truck down, and as they approached, they saw that these two figures that they thought were maybe toddlers that they described as two to three feet tall were not human and were what they said were goblins.

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  They said they were kind of grayish in skin tone, very large, kind of roundish black eyes, pointy ears.

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  And the couple just really confused and kind of just in shock of what they were seeing, then sped up and sped off.

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  I immediately believe that this is a real experience that someone had. But I'm not necessarily convinced or believe that goblins exist.

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  I'm just like, "Oh, my gosh, what is this? Is this some kind of real phenomenon of something? Or is this like something that's arising out of the trauma everyone has just been in too?" Like, my head is kind of spinning.

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  I leave the quiet room, and I go back to the convening and kind of moving around outside. There are different workshops happening at that point, and I run into my friend Gwen. Gwen is someone that I very much look up to. She is a community organizer, an artist, a culture bearer that does really great work in her community. She's just one of those Appalachian women that gets stuff done. And I said, "Gwen, I just heard that people are maybe starting to see these goblins after the flood."

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  And she looked at me just straight in the face and said, "I've seen them."

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  I rolled up into my driveway one night, and I was really stressed out. We were doing flood relief efforts at our community center, and I was trying to cook meals with no, we didn't have running water. And so, we were having to carry water from the best sources that we had in order to cook and clean and take care of the vulnerable population.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  And so, I was so preoccupied with the thoughts of all that, that I wasn't really thinking about nothing much, except that I was dog tired and I was going to go home for a few hours and try to sleep.

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  My driveway was washed out, so I was driving through probably a foot of water. We often hear, "If you see floodwaters, don't drive through them," you know, that sort of thing. But I just plowed running through it because I was determined to get out to the house.

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  When I drove on up, it was twilight. I've got a woodpile right beside my front steps, and I saw this little bin squatted down behind the woodpile.

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  I was like, "Oh, shit. What is this?"

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  He's maybe three feet tall at the most. He had big eyes and pointed ears, and he had on a little, we call it a turtle hat. It's one of the first protective hats that miners wore, and they were made out of leather. And then they have a little brim on them where a carbide lamp would see it. And he had one of those on.

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  "What the heck does this thing want with me, and why is it here?"

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  So, I had the chills. I had the racing heartbeat, because I didn't know what his intention was.

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  I didn't feel it was a physical threat like I would if it was a coyote or a bear.

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  He was looking at me like he was curious.

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  But there was such a feeling of doom around the whole community at the time that I didn't feel like I could encounter anything else earth shaking.

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  I had things in the car I was gonna carry in, but I didn't carry them in. I just exited my car, act like I didn't see him. I had to climb up on my porch. And so I averted my eyes and said, I'm ignoring you, kinda like I do my ex-husband.

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  And then I went up them steps at a pretty brisk pace. Went in the house as fast as I could, locked the door. And then I immediately started looking out the window to see if I could get a better look at him.

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  But he was not there. He was gone.

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  That night, every bump, every knock, every creek in my old house, I felt like was him.

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  I was just trying not to even think about him, but I couldn't quit thinking about him.

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  And yeah, sleep, sleep didn't come.

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  A few days later, I was driving. A woman had called and I went and got her to come and get supplies. So she lives in a mine community that's within about a mile of us. And I had taken her back home with her supplies and we'd unloaded them. And so I had come around her little street and was cutting back down to the main road. And I saw him again.

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  Just like out of my peripheral vision. And I'm like, was that him?

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  And then I look in the rearview mirror and it was, and he was there.

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  He was squatted down again in the corner of a fence, just kinda observing. Same way he was looking at me at my house.

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  Curious.

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  He was dressed the same, had on that same hat, those ears sticking up, those big old eyes. Yeah, it was him.

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  There was a car coming and I hit the brake at that stop sign.

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  And when I looked back up, he was gone.

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  I'm like, you know, here he is, he showed up again.

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  Maybe he'll come regularly and maybe I'll figure out what he wants. But I didn't tell anybody what I'd seen. For one thing, they were all dealing with their own crises.

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  And the other thing is I felt like they'd say I was crazy.

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  And then, you know, I go to this conference and I encounter Laura Smith. And lo and behold, Laura Smith says, Gwen, I need to talk to you. And I said, what about?

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  I know I was just wrapped, just completely captivated by Gwen telling this story. My curiosity then just kind of went into overdrive of wanting to understand if other people had seen these things, what they meant and what they could mean. And so I really just started talking to people about it and asking if anybody knew anything about it.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  The organization that I was working for at the time has an office downtown and we had so many volunteers there. And I would just bring it up with them. People would be like, wait, what? And then occasionally people would be like, oh my gosh, I know someone who saw something and told me this crazy story and you should talk to them.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  I got put in touch with someone that had gotten off the main road and we're on a smaller, kind of one lane little road. And there is a being that's standing next to a tree, kind of on the slope going up the mountainside. Very large black eyes. Was wearing like some kind of covering, almost like an apron.

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  Another one, similar story, driving out to check on neighbors. Saw a figure about three and a half feet tall with large black eyes that was kinda standing next to the tree and then quickly disappeared behind the tree as he drove by in his truck.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  I didn't think that people were like pulling my leg or like telling me a story to tell me a story, trying to get one over on me.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  But there were definitely moments through this where I was like, this cannot be real.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  I know, right? But not to fear. There are more goblins right after the break. Stay tuned.

• 36:14Speaker 00

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• 38:29Speaker 00

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment. My name is Lynn Washington. And this week, from Snap's evil twin podcast, Spooked. Stories from real people who can scarcely believe it happened themselves. We're on a journey like no other. The goblins of Eastern Kentucky, already in progress.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  One day I was in the office and a reporter from a local community radio station was in our office doing some interviews. They were doing great reporting, local reporting about the flood, the aftermath, how communities were responding and also getting out a lot of good information about resources that were available for folks. A couple other people were standing around, including some coworkers. My friend Balin was there and my friend Stacy, who I work with. And there was also a reporter from the BBC. Balin and Stacy already knew about the goblins and I said something about them. And these two reporters who were there were like, wait, what?

• 39:35Speaker 02

  And so I said, yeah, like people are seeing these goblins and we're like on the search, you know, for them. We're trying to find them.

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  That's when the local reporter said, oh, my friend Bo had a story.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  I think it's like a day or two later, I'd gotten a text message and it was from the woman who had called me originally to try and locate her family.

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  She had made contact with them and they were all right.

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  And I just felt like so relieved for her. But it was also like I didn't have any time to enjoy that relief. I was like, I gotta keep doing what I was doing.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  I'd just been delivering oxygen and like running around, medical supplies, food, checking on folks. And like, there's a lot of families. So, you know, you check on one person, then you gotta go check on their cousin. And then their cousin needs you to go check on their sister's boyfriend. So you're running all over Eastern Kentucky. So I'd been doing that all day and I was trying to find like a place to stay. And my friend Katie, who's a reporter in the area, was crashing on one of their friend's couches, kind of like just a little bit out of town,

• 41:13Speaker 01

  up on a hillside and said I could come and stay there with them and their friends. But I'm kind of a lone wolf a bit, so I was planning to just kind of park in their driveway and sleep in my truck. I went to, I think it was like an Ingles grocery store or something. It was like half flooded and stinky, but the beer section was open. So I got a beer and a big thing of peanuts and random, like a block of cheese or something

• 41:51Speaker 01

  just to like snack on and headed back to this person's house.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  You kind of go up this dirt road a little bit. And then there's this big white farmhouse with a big old wraparound porch. And there's a tree line right off to the right side of the house, maybe like 100 yards at most away from where I parked. It's probably like 9:30 or 10:00, so it's pretty dark. But the porch light's on and it's kind of illuminating the front yard a bit. I'm sitting in my truck in the driveway.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  I'm a truck sitter, like, I think that's probably not a California thing, but if you have a truck, you gotta sit in it and you think about stuff. I'd just had such a long day, like talking to this lady. She'd been on her roof for a couple of days during the flood. And she was like, "My son was in the top of that tree. His body was just there for the past couple of days and we just now were able to get him down." And so I was truck sitting, just thinking about like, "We're completely [__] like

• 43:31Speaker 01

  this is so bad." I was feeling really tense. My like shoulders hurt. Like, it's a lot to hold in your body. And I'm not a big drinker by any means, but I was definitely excited to have a beer. I'm so tense. I think I had on some local radio thing and I'm staring at the wood line. And then this thing starts to kind of materialize into the foreground, like right on the periphery of where the light ends and like the forest begins.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  It really just slowly materialized, starting like at the chest and then it just became like this whole being. I'm just staring at it and it kind of moves more out of the tree line into the light just a little bit. And it looks kind of like the little mangled pile I saw in the side of the road. It's maybe like a foot bigger.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  And its skin is like this kind of grayish color. And it's got these huge eyes and those big ears. It wasn't moving or anything. It was just kind of there, staring in my direction. I felt surprised by the initial like recognition that there was something there. But then I'm feeling that tension of the day kind of fade away.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  It was like a very somatic feeling of release and just like my shoulders felt relaxed. I didn't have my tongue like jamming into the roof of my mouth. It almost felt like I was receiving encouragement not to be fearful of what was happening. And then my radio starts going crazy. Not just interference, you know, like when you drive out of zone or whatever with your radio and it changes. It was like, like making crazy noises.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  I'm staring at this thing and I'm trying to text my friend Katie, who's in the house. And I'm like, "There's something out here." And she comes out, but it's like, almost like it got sucked back into the wood line. It just kind of was gone. And I was like, "There is this thing with like these huge ears in the wood line." She was like, "Yeah, it's crazy up here.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Don't get all crazy about it." After, you know, we had that brief interaction, we just kind of like hung out. We didn't even really talk about it more. We just started talking about like what parts of the county we were going to try and get into the next day and stuff like that. She was like, "You can totally come inside." And the people she was staying with were super nice and they had made the couch up or something and had food and stuff. But I was kind of feeling like a swampy, alone.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  And so I was like, "I'm gonna stay in my truck." Ended up actually just going and driving around for a while because I had to move on from truck sitting to truck, you know, driving around thinking. I really feel like I wouldn't have had these sightings if I hadn't been responding to the floods. I think that the sightings occurred because the goblins were directly impacted by the flooding.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  I really feel like they live in the mines. I don't know. It makes sense. You know, it's pretty like climate controlled down there. And there's even sometimes like underground little rivers with fish in them. They probably got washed out of their caves.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  I would say that at this point in time, I believe that people really had these experiences and really saw these things. The stories are too convincing and also too eerily similar. I think I just started thinking about like, is there anything like this that I've ever heard of? You know, that's what led me to think about stories about tommy knockers in the mines. The story is that miners have reported hearing knocks, like that they can't explain,

• 49:36Speaker 02

  mysterious knocking on the mine walls, often before a disaster happens where part of the mine collapses. I did make a connection between the way that tommy knockers were maybe there to warn people about a pending disaster and the fact that these goblins suddenly showed up. We're seeing a series of climate disasters. And so I did kind of take them as a sign that we need to reimagine some things.

• 50:21Speaker 03

  I asked this guy who was also a co-miner. He and his wife and I were hanging out one evening at the community center. And I said, "Tell me, have you ever encountered anything in the coal mines that you didn't know what it was?" And he said, "Yeah, everywhere I ever worked." He was very candid about it. He said, "Yeah, they're always in there." I think in times of crisis, maybe the veil gets a little thin.

• 51:03Speaker 03

  I had never been in such a struggle before, trying to serve the folks that were in need. So I don't know if, if that helped me see him. Maybe it did. But I feel like somehow the veil was a little thinner then. Maybe it was thinner for everybody, or maybe it was just thinner for me. I don't know.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  I don't really have many regrets, but I do regret not going into the woods that time. It just felt like there was some sort of need not being met that maybe I potentially could have helped with. And maybe I went a little wing nutty, but I keep a little goblin, I call it my goblin first aid kit in my car now, in case I ever see another one. It's just in a little like half gallon Ziploc bag. I put like a non irritating cleansing wipe instead of alcohol pads because I don't want to like burn their skin or something.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  A couple different sizes of gauze. There's some Band-Aids in there. And then there's a couple sterile Q-tips. And I cut like one of those neon yellow index cards. I cut one in half and wrote goblin use only with a black cross, like the first aid symbol cross. And then I put my name and that I can offer confidential care because they probably don't want, you know, everyone up in their business. But I'm down to help.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  Big thanks to Laura Smith, to Bo Morgan and Gwen Johnson for sharing your stories with us. Spooksters, if you want to know more about the goblins of Eastern Kentucky, Laura wrote a wonderful piece about them for Oxford American. Find it in our show notes. Original score for this piece was by Doug Stewart, was scouted and produced by Zoe Fergino.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  As the days go darker, do you need your own map to the mystery? Our Evil Twin Podcast, Spooked, serves up stories from the shadow each and every week. And right now, our most ambitious project ever, The Spooked: Field Guide to the Shadow. Brand new episodes every week until All-Hallowed Eve. So if you dig it, subscribe to the Spooked Podcast right now on any podcast platform. Tell the robots to their face that no Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission. On Team Spook, the union represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members

• 54:25Speaker 00

  of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Work of America, AFL-CIL Local 51, and... Spooked is brought to you by the team that treats every kind of creature with love and respect, even those with gray skin and pointy ears. Especially Mark Ristich, because he knows what it's like to have gray skin and pointy ears. Please recognize Davy Kim, Zoe Fergino, Eric Yanez, Marissa Dodge, Regina Barriaco, Miles Lassie, Taylor Decot, Doug Stewart, Nicholas Marks. The Spook theme song is by

• 55:07Speaker 00

  Pat Massey Miller, My Name's Glen Washington. And by piecing together the ancient remaining fragments, the notations, the references of the Book of Shadows, we build this field guide. We know the first text chronicle, the monsters that dwell amongst us in elaborate detail as a warning. It also notes a wholly different type of creature, a being that lies without compunction, a being that takes, that sneers, that names its own evil good, and calls that which is good, evil. Such a being delights

• 55:50Speaker 00

  in horrors and flickered on others, but the Book of Shadows notes dismissively, such creatures are not monsters. They are weak, unworthy of notice and beneath contempt. No, it says, the true monsters are those that follow them. Never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never, never, ever. Turn out the lights.