Kentucky Family Flees After Goats Vanish and Tall Figure Filmed

There's a video that recently crossed my feed that I can't stop thinking about, and if you haven't seen it yet, you're going to want to carve out some time for this one. A security camera on a small family farm in Eastern Kentucky captured something that has researchers and witnesses buzzing, and the story behind the footage is just as compelling as what's on the screen. Back in April of 2016, a woman named Ronda Combmes was living on five acres up a hollow road outside Hazard in Perry County, Kentucky, with her two sons, Wesley and Dustin. She had a small goat pen, and on the morning of April 4th, she went out to feed and found one of her goats simply gone. Not dead. Gone. No blood, no body, no drag trail, no hole dug under the fence. Just an empty pen and three terrified goats bunched in the far corner that wouldn't come to the feed bucket. Now, anyone who has spent time around goats knows they will come to that bucket. It's basically a reflex. The fact that those three wouldn't move from that corner told Ronda something was deeply wrong. Over the next nine days, she lost three more goats, one at a time, always at night. The local sheriff's deputy came out twice and wrote "coyote" on his report both times. But here's where the story takes a turn that should make any researcher sit up and pay attention. The fence wasn't dug under. It wasn't pushed down. The wire had been lifted upward, toward the sky. The heavy fence staples that held the woven wire to the wooden posts had been pulled straight out of the wood, four and five of them along the tops of two different posts, lying scattered in the wet grass with their bent ends still bright and silver where they had been buried in the post just hours before. Her 15-year-old son Wesley, a kid who had been hunting since he was nine and had field dressed his own deer, stood there turning one of those staples over in his fingers and asked his mother a question that has probably haunted her ever since: "Mom, what pulls staples out of a post going up?" Ronda had a security camera on a wooden pole by the driveway, one she had put up a couple of years earlier during a rough patch in her life. She climbed up on the tailgate of her truck, turned it on its bracket, and pointed it at the goat pen and the black wall of trees beyond it. What that camera captured over the following days is the heart of this video, and honestly, it's the kind of evidence that doesn't come along often. The footage shows something crossing the open width of that gravel yard upright, in just a handful of strides. Not running low and bent the way a man would. Not moving on all fours the way any canine would. It came across smooth and level, the whole trunk of it held upright, covering that whole stretch of ground in a way that would have taken a man twice as many steps. And then the yard was empty again. After that Wednesday night, it never stopped until every goat she owned was gone off that mountain. Ronda loaded up what the family could carry in one trip and drove down to her sister's house in the town of Viper. None of them ever spent another night on that land. She sold the property within two months and never set foot on it again. What makes this video worth your time isn't just the footage itself, though that footage is significant. It's the way the whole account is presented, in Ronda's own voice, on a cassette tape she recorded start to finish and gave to the local paper along with the disc. The paper never ran a word of it. The disc and the tape sat in a cardboard box in the back of that office for years, the tape fixed with a strip of packing tape to the inside of the disc case. And it's that tape you're hearing in the video, her own words, her own cadence, her own way of describing the difference between a dead goat and a gone goat. There's a line in there that stuck with me. She said a dead goat is a sad thing and a normal thing and you deal with it and you go on with your morning. A gone goat is a question that will not let you go on with anything at all. For anyone who has spent time in the hollows of Eastern Kentucky, the cultural backdrop here matters. Perry County sits deep in the Appalachian foothills, terrain that has been home to Sasquatch reports for generations. The dense hardwood cover, the steep hollows, the limited visibility, all of it creates the kind of environment where these beings have reportedly thrived for centuries. The cultural memory of large, hairy wild men in the woods runs deep in this region, and Ronda Combmes wasn't someone reaching for an explanation. She was someone trying very hard to find an ordinary one and running out of options. The video does something rare with this kind of account. It lets the witness speak for herself, without narration talking over her, without dramatic music drowning out her words. You hear the hesitation in her voice when she gets to the part about the staples. You hear the weight of it when she talks about her boys. And you hear the quiet certainty of a woman who saw something come across her yard that did not move the way anything she had ever seen moved before. I won't spoil the ending of the video, because the way the whole account arrives at its final moment is something you should experience for yourself. But I will say this: the camera pole gets one more mention at the very end, and there is a reason it waits for the end. If you're someone who takes these reports seriously, and you should, because the people who live through them certainly do, this is one worth sitting with. Go watch it. Let Ronda Combmes tell it the way she told it to her own kitchen table.