Goblins of Eastern Kentucky

A powerful flood brings things once buried to the surface in the Appalachian Mountains.

• 0:08Speaker 00

  There was a Book of Shadows once. Its pages showed the way so travelers through the secret lands could not be led astray. They burned the Book of Shadows because the mystery hates the light and those who ventured after kept unguarded through the night. Until now. This is your invitation. The Spooked Field Guide to the Shadow. Stay tuned.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Why have so many crop circles appeared around Britain? How did thousands of people demonstrate powers of telepathy? Can the dead suck the life from the living? Join me, Tim Harford, for a trip into the paranormal throughout Halloween month on Cautionary Tales. Listen to Cautionary Tales on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like, and that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average $21 with insurance, and some pay as little as $0 depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality licensed therapists across the US, offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights, and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability, and you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as $0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com/booknow. That's growtherapy.com/booknow. Growtherapy.com/booknow. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  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, a kind of smile, a long stare.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  And when I dialed them in just right, I heard voices.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  But sometimes, those voices grew loud.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  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. "What is wrong with you?", they said. "What is wrong with me?", I wanted as well. Until I hated me too.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  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, 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 there, staring, not at him, but at the shadow around him. The swirl of darkness buzzing about him, devouring him.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  She whispers to me, "You see it, don't you? Don't you?"

• 5:54Speaker 00

  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, "But I'm not."

• 6:23Speaker 00

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

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Why?"

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Her eyes are yellow.

• 6:46Speaker 00

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

• 6:58Speaker 00

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

• 7:10Speaker 00

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

• 7:15Speaker 00

  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. Chapter One, The Spooked Field Guide to the Shadow. Starts Now.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  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

• 9:11Speaker 00

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

• 9:18Speaker 00

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

• 9:36Speaker 00

  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. Spooked.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  My name's Beau Morgan and I'm a paramedic. I've been doing disaster relief work on and off since 2016.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  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 gone missing.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  I left around seven or eight in the morning and would have left earlier, but it was so stormy.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  I brought clean drinking water. 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.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  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.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  And it was still raining so hard. My wipers were going as fast as they could.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  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.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  And I think I see something on the side of the road.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  I'm really looking at this thing, this little pile. And it's kind of taking shape.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  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.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  I just feel immediately like I need to bear witness, I guess, to whatever it is. Cause it's, you know, clearly not alive, but is something that could have been.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  It had these like huge ears and these like long fingers. They're so long and skinny and its legs are real skinny.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  It kind of had like a bib thing on, like a baby bib, but it was kind of leathery.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  You know, my like hair stands on end and I'm starting to feel a little freaked out

• 15:24Speaker 03

  because I'd never seen anything like that before.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  And it really did, like it had little hairs and its big ears. But I don't really believe in stuff like that.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  And so I decide like, I'm not going to mess with this. You know, I need to keep going. I was just drawn to getting to the folks that I was trying to help.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  But it was just too, too strange to stop thinking about.

• 16:50Speaker 03

  I was just like, don't lose your shit before you even get to the spot.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  Driving into downtown Hazard, there's just debris everywhere, like metal scraps.

• 17:21Speaker 04

  There's a, a mobile home that's been mangled and is pushed up against the side of a riverbank.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  I also saw a Ford, like F-150, like a very large pickup truck, you know, turned on its side.

• 17:43Speaker 04

  Seeing those things, it created such a, a deep bodily reaction for me of just kind of terror.

• 17:54Speaker 04

  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.

• 18:06Speaker 04

  And just the force of that and how scary that is.

• 18:13Speaker 04

  I just had this real, just this ache.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  People died, people were dead, people lost everything.

• 18:23Speaker 04

  And these places that were so familiar to me, where I'd driven through, you know, countless times were unrecognizable.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  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.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  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.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  It was really, really, really bad.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  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.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  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.

• 21:28Speaker 04

  And I go in and lay down.

• 21:32Speaker 04

  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.

• 21:54Speaker 04

  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.

• 22:08Speaker 04

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

• 22:27Speaker 04

  My first thought when she asked that is that I must have misheard what she said.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  I lift up my head and look at her.

• 22:41Speaker 04

  I'm just like, "What?"

• 22:44Speaker 04

  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."

• 23:01Speaker 04

  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.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  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.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  One was standing up and wearing what they called the kilt that looked homemade.

• 23:49Speaker 04

  One was sitting down and kind of rocking with its hands on its head, like looking very distressed.

• 23:58Speaker 04

  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.

• 24:12Speaker 04

  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.

• 24:38Speaker 04

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

• 24:51Speaker 04

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

• 25:11Speaker 04

  I immediately believe that this is a real experience that someone had.

• 25:21Speaker 04

  But I'm not necessarily convinced or believe that goblins exist.

• 25:29Speaker 04

  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.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  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.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  And I said, "Gwen, I just heard that people are maybe starting to see these goblins after the flood."

• 26:30Speaker 04

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

• 26:47Speaker 05

  I rolled up into my driveway one night. And I was really stressed out.

• 26:55Speaker 05

  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. 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.

• 27:36Speaker 05

  My driveway was washed out. So, I was driving through probably a foot of water.

• 27:44Speaker 05

  We often hear, "If you see floodwaters, don't drive through them," you know, that sort of thing. But I just plowed right on through it because I was determined to get out to the house.

• 27:58Speaker 05

  When I drove on up, it was twilight.

• 28:03Speaker 05

  I've got a woodpile right beside my front steps. And I saw this little man squatted down behind the woodpile.

• 28:19Speaker 05

  I was like, "Oh, shit.

• 28:23Speaker 05

  What is this?"

• 28:28Speaker 05

  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.

• 29:06Speaker 05

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

• 29:13Speaker 05

  So, I had the chills. I had the racing heartbeat

• 29:20Speaker 05

  because I didn't know what his intention was.

• 29:26Speaker 05

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

• 29:37Speaker 05

  He was looking at me like he was curious.

• 29:43Speaker 05

  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.

• 30:00Speaker 05

  I had things in the car I was going to 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," kind of like I do my ex-husband.

• 30:23Speaker 05

  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.

• 30:41Speaker 05

  But he was not there. He was gone.

• 30:52Speaker 05

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

• 31:06Speaker 05

  I was just trying not to even think about him, but I couldn't quit thinking about him. And yeah, sleep, sleep didn't come.

• 31:21Speaker 05

  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.

• 31:55Speaker 05

  And I saw him again.

• 31:59Speaker 05

  Just like out of my peripheral vision.

• 32:04Speaker 05

  And I'm like, was that him?

• 32:08Speaker 05

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

• 32:15Speaker 05

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

• 32:30Speaker 05

  Curious.

• 32:34Speaker 05

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

• 32:47Speaker 05

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

• 32:54Speaker 05

  And when I looked back up, he was gone.

• 33:00Speaker 05

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

• 33:06Speaker 05

  Maybe he'll come regularly and maybe I'll figure out what he wants.

• 33:13Speaker 05

  But I didn't tell anybody what I'd seen. For one thing, they were all dealing with their own crises.

• 33:23Speaker 05

  And the other thing is I felt like they said I was crazy.

• 33:36Speaker 05

  And then, you know, I go to this conference and I encounter Laura Smith.

• 33:44Speaker 05

  And lo and behold, Laura Smith says, Gwen, I need to talk to you. And I said, what about?

• 33:55Speaker 04

  I know I was just wrapped, just completely captivated by Gwen telling the story.

• 34:05Speaker 04

  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.

• 34:23Speaker 04

  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?

• 34:38Speaker 04

  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.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  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.

• 35:13Speaker 04

  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 kind of standing next to the tree and then quickly disappeared behind the tree as he drove by in his truck.

• 35:39Speaker 04

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

• 36:09Speaker 00

  This episode is sponsored by Vinted. Imagine opening my closet, looking for a shirt, and I see that jacket, that jacket, that jacket I got for that party I never went to three years ago. That jacket, it's still there, it's still mocking me. Well, it was still there. Because then I stopped and I reached for my phone because Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes that you no longer wear. Listing on Vinted is quick and simple. Once an item sells, Vinted creates the prepaid shipping label for you. And Vinted has no seller fees. I mean, you keep every dollar you earn.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  And I could get a little more room in my closet, you know, for that next jacket. Give your clothes a second life with Vinted. Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. No seller fees, so you keep everything you earn.

• 37:09Speaker 06

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  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.

• 38:34Speaker 04

  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? 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.

• 38:50Speaker 04

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

• 38:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 39:14Speaker 03

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

• 39:19Speaker 03

  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.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  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, up on a hillside. Instead, I could come and stay there with them and their friends.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  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.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  I went to, I think it was like an Ingalls 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 just to like snack on. And headed back to this person's house.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  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.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  I'm sitting in my truck in the driveway. 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.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  I'd just had such a long day, like, talking to this lady. She'd been on her roof for a couple 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 days, and we just now were able to get him down."

• 42:31Speaker 03

  And so I was truck sitting, just thinking about like, "We're completely fucked. Like, this is so bad."

• 42:40Speaker 03

  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.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  It really just slowly materialized,

• 43:26Speaker 03

  starting like at the chest, and then it just became like this whole being.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  And I'm just staring at it. And it kind of moves more out of the tree line into the light just a little bit.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  And it looks kind of like the little mangled pile I saw in the side of the road.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  It's maybe like a foot bigger.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  And its skin is like this kind of grayish color. And it's got these huge eyes and those big ears.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  It wasn't moving or anything. It was just kind of there, staring in my direction.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  I felt surprised by the initial, like, recognition that there was something there.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  But then, I'm feeling that tension of the day kind of fade away. 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.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  It almost felt like I was receiving encouragement not to be fearful of what was happening.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  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."

• 45:41Speaker 03

  And she comes out. But it's like, almost like it got sucked back into the wood line.

• 45:53Speaker 03

  It just kind of was gone.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  And I was like, "There is this thing with like these huge ears in the wood line."

• 46:07Speaker 03

  She was like, "Yeah, it's crazy up here. Don't get all crazy about it."

• 46:21Speaker 03

  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 gonna try and get into the next day and stuff like that.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  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 I was swampy alone. And so I was like, "I'm gonna stay in my truck."

• 47:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  I really feel like I wouldn't have had these sightings if I hadn't been responding to the floods.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  I think that the sightings occurred because the goblins were directly impacted by the flooding.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 48:00Speaker 04

  I would say that at this point in time,

• 48:06Speaker 04

  I believe that people really had these experiences and really saw these things.

• 48:12Speaker 04

  The stories are too convincing and also too eerily similar.

• 48:20Speaker 04

  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.

• 48:35Speaker 04

  The story is that miners have reported hearing knocks, like, that they can't explain, mysterious knocking on the mine walls, often before a disaster happens where part of the mine collapses.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  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.

• 49:10Speaker 04

  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.

• 49:26Speaker 05

  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."

• 49:53Speaker 05

  He was very candid about it. He said, "Yeah, they're always in there."

• 50:01Speaker 05

  I think in times across this, maybe the veil gets a little thin.

• 50:08Speaker 05

  I had never been in such a struggle before, trying to serve the folks that were in need.

• 50:17Speaker 05

  So I don't know if that helped me see him. Maybe it did.

• 50:26Speaker 05

  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.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  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.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  And maybe I went a little wingnutty, 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. 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.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  I cut one in half and wrote "goblin use only" with a black cross, like the first aid symbol cross.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  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.

• 52:06Speaker 03

  But I'm down to help.

• 52:18Speaker 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. The original score for this piece was by Doug Stewart, was scouted and produced by Zoe Fregno.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  This, dear spookster, is but the first chapter. The revelation continues as we uncover a new volume each and every week before all-hallowed Eve. And if you yourself experience a vision that must be noted in the Spook Field Guide to the Shadow, please let me know. [email protected] because there's nothing better than a foretelling from a spook listener.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  KQED in San Francisco, carefully, very carefully, sets the wards every night around the spook catacombs. Please, please, please, please, I beg you, don't seek to find it lest it seek to find you. 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 of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL, CIL, Local 51, and...

• 54:01Speaker 00

  Spook 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 Fregno, Eric Yanez, Marissa Dodge, Regina Berriaco, Miles Lassie, Taylor Decot, Doug Stewart, Nicholas Marks. The Spook theme song is by Pat Mercedes Miller, My Name's from Washington.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  And by piecing together the ancient remaining fragments, the notations, the references of the Book of Shadow, 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 in horrors inflicted on others, but the Book of Shadows notes dismissively, "Such creatures

• 55:24Speaker 00

  are not monsters. They are weak, unworthy of notice and beneath contempt." No, it says, "The true monsters are those that follow them."

• 55:43Speaker 00

  Never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never, never, ever.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  Turn out the lights.