The LBL murders

Located in rural Kentucky and Tennessee, in the United states, tucked between Lake Barkley and Kentucky Lake is a national recreation area called the Land Between the Lakes, which was originally formed by President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Besides its modern designation as a recreation area, encompassing 170,000 acres of forest, over 300 miles of shoreline, and hundreds of miles of hiking trials, the area has also long been plagued by a variety of high strangeness. The most bizarre is the history of strange tales of bizarre, bipedal creatures which prowl in the landscape here and has been called the “The Beast Between the Rivers” as well as the “Beast of the Land Between the Lakes.” The creatures itself typically said to look rather like a bipedal wolf, standing around 7, 10, or even 12 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. In some instances, these hunters and trappers were said to venture into the wilderness to never be seen again, and this was blamed on the mysterious, ravenous beast. 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. This happened in the early 1980s, when police were called to a campground in an area known for its abandoned military bunkers, where they were greeted with a rather morbid and grisly sight. There in the campsite were the badly mutilated bodies of three of the four campers, a young couple and their child, with their corpses in an appalling state. They seemed to have been ruthlessly savaged and half eaten by some powerful wild animal, with limbs missing, flesh flayed or torn from bone, organs scattered on the ground, and deep scratches and bite marks all over them, none of which matched any animal known to inhabit the region. As authorities searched for the missing child, one police officer called Adam went up ahead to investigate, and Jan would describe what happened next: "From somewhere in the nearby woods, about 50 yards from the campfire, a scream was heard. A man’s shriek that turned into a long wail and then to whimpering. As others arrived they could see by the gleam of several flashlights that the cop was holding his hat in one hand and his light in the other. There was blood on his face, the front of his shirt and on the brim of his hat. More blood could be seen dripping on him. It was coming from above. High in the trees the flash lights swung, searching for the source of the mysterious bleeding. A very small hand could be seen dangling down from a tree limb way up high, as well as a slender lifeless leg that still had a white sock still on the foot. The missing child had been located. It had been Adam that the blood had trickled upon, hitting his hat first, making him look up, and then feeling the thick cold fluid sprinkling his face then sliding down to his neatly buttoned shirt. It had been Adam that had screamed. The little girl had apparently been carried up the tree and leisurely eaten upon while carefully laid across a large tree branch. More of the same long gray and brown hair was found sticking in the bark of the tree near her body. Samples of saliva were sent for analysis and came back as being from an unidentified species." This report never made it into the news or media, and was covered up by the government as it was seen as a threat to the "tourism industry", if word of such a mysteriously gruesome incident got out. There are several more stories in LBL that have been told over the years after this particular incident.