Kentucky Family Flees Home After Bigfoot Captured on Camera

Posted Wednesday, August 05, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

A security camera in Eastern Kentucky may have captured something extraordinary back in 2016, and the story behind that footage is one of the most unsettling accounts I've come across in a long time. The footage comes from a property in Perry County, near the town of Hazard, where a woman named Rhonda Combmes lived with her two sons on five acres tucked up a hollow road in the mountains. Over the course of nine days in April 2016, she lost four goats — one at a time, always at night, always without a trace. No blood. No body. No hole dug under the fence. Just... gone. What makes this case stand out from the typical livestock predation reports is the physical evidence left behind. When her 15-year-old son Wesley walked the fence line on the second morning, he found something that didn't fit any ordinary explanation. The woven wire had been lifted upward, toward the sky, not crushed down or dug under. Heavy fence staples had been pulled straight out of the wooden posts — drawn upward, not pushed in or broken off. The top panel of the wire bowed outward and up, the way a bedsheet bows when something stands up underneath it. Wesley, a seasoned young hunter who had been field dressing deer since age nine, stood there in the cold turning one of those bright staples over in his fingers and asked his mother a question that has haunted her ever since: "Mom, what pulls staples out of a post going up?" That afternoon, Rhonda climbed up on the tailgate of her pickup truck and turned a security camera that had been sitting unused on a pole by the driveway — leftover from a rough patch after her husband left — so it faced the goat pen and the tree line beyond it. What that camera captured over the following nights was eventually handed over to the local newspaper on a disc with nothing written on the label, along with a cassette tape of Rhonda telling the whole story in her own voice. The paper never ran a word of it. The disc and tape sat in a cardboard box in the back of that office for years. The footage itself shows something crossing the open gravel yard in the deep middle of the night — upright, in just a few strides, smooth and level the way a person walks fast across a familiar room in the dark. Rhonda sat at her kitchen table with the lights off and a shotgun across her knees, watching the empty yard afterward, trying to count the steps. A man would have needed twice as many to cover that same ground. The Perry County Sheriff's Deputy who came out to the property twice wrote down the word "coyote" both times, standing in her driveway with his clipboard. By the morning of April 12th, Rhonda had loaded everything her family could carry into the truck and driven down the mountain to her sister's house in 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. This case has all the hallmarks of the kind of encounter researchers have been documenting for decades in Appalachia — a region with one of the deepest traditions of Sasquatch sightings in North America. Perry County sits in the heart of eastern Kentucky's coal country, where the hollows run deep into old growth forest and the local oral tradition about "the wild man" or "the old thing in the woods" goes back generations. The behavior described here — taking livestock without leaving typical predator evidence, lifting heavy fencing upward rather than breaching it downward, returning night after night until every animal is gone — matches a pattern that has shown up in similar reports across the Pacific Northwest, the Ohio Valley, and throughout the Appalachian range. The full account, including Rhonda's own words on that cassette tape and the camera footage, is worth sitting down and watching all the way through. It's one of those stories that stays with you long after the screen goes dark. Catch the full video here and decide for yourself what came up out of those trees.