In my last post, I told a frightening story of a beast that is said to be living in Land between the Lakes. I call this frightening because there appears to be some evidence to back up claims of the creature’s existence.
The creature itself is typically said to look rather like a bipedal wolf, standing around 7 feet tall, and sporting clawed hands, powerful jaws with wicked teeth, glowing red eyes, and cloaked in a fetid, rotting stench. The area and its surrounding region have long held such dark 
legends from before the time of the first settlers to trickle into western Kentucky. Some of the first Europeans in the region were French trappers and hunters, who claimed that the forests were prowled by a massive beast, half-man and half-wolf, which would howl in the night and leave the mutilated carcasses of animals in its wake; a monstrous entity that was called the loup garou.
According to the native Shawnee tribe who lived near the area at the time, this abomination was the spirit of a powerful shapeshifting shaman, and outsiders were frequently warned away from the area. When settlers began to come to the region, they are said to have been plagued by some large predator which lurked in the shadows killing and maiming their livestock, with witnesses saying the culprit was a hairy, wolf-like beast on two legs which unleashed bloodcurdling howls and shrieks into the night. The sightings of the monster were still frequent throughout the beginning of the twentieth century, and in more recent times, an elderly group of men in Grand Rapids, Ky. sitting on a bench in front of a store, repeated some unsettling encounters they or members of their own families had with it. Each one told stories of finding livestock slaughtered, ripped to pieces and eaten upon. Cows and pigs with their legs dismembered from the sockets. Even a few horses had met their end with savage attacks upon their bodies.
A few of them described what they saw at different times when they caught glimpses of the figure by peeking out of the curtains of the windows into the night.
There have seemingly been quite a lot of alleged encounters with the Beast of the Land between the Lakes even up into more modern times. There are several more stories that I have heard about this ‘Werewolf’ over in LBL. There were groups of boy scouts that had seen it. Several more campers, fishermen and boaters that had seen it from the safety of their boats, floating in some of the many bays that touched upon the shoreline. Hikers and bikers have heard its howling and have seen ‘something’ stalking them while they were on rural trails, hiding amongst the trees and foliage. Hunters have run across deer carcasses that had been brutally torn apart. In the meantime, others have come forward with their own experiences with the fierce, elusive beast, and reports of a feeling of being watched, hearing howls, or coming across the badly mauled carcasses of deer and other wildlife have come in on occasion. All of them agreed that this was not a Bigfoot or Sasquatch. Evidence for and encounters 
with the Beast between the Lakes continues to this day.
Sometimes physical evidence is claimed, such as odd footprints (see photo), tufts of hair, and dug out “nests” that appear to have been slept in by something large, but these have all remained inconclusive at best. There are even audio recordings of howls that sound similar to coyotes or wolves…but different. The following link is to a video that one researcher posted about the beast and even describes a death or two attributed to it. You can watch it at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaTBKacJ1pk . One other thing, many of the sightings and reports appear to come from areas north of Hwy 68-80.
So what is the Beast of the Land Between the Lakes? Witnesses claim it is something other than Bigfoot, so what could it be? It is a misidentification of some other animal? Is it an actual werewolf, as some have claimed? Could it perhaps be some sort of specter or spirit, and this is why it leaves behind little to no physical evidence and is the reason for its outlandish appearance? Or is this all just tale tales, myth, and urban legend? No one really knows, but it remains an unsettling case of what might or might not be something very strange indeed roaming about in the wilderness of the Land Between the Lakes. Leave comments or hit the “Like” button at the bottom of this to let me know if you enjoyed reading this story.
