Supernatural Sightings After a Flood

_“Lord willing and the creek don’t rise” is more than a turn of phrase in Appalachia. It’s a prayer. It’s always untelling what rising waters might bring, but no one was ready for the signs and wonders that followed in the days after the flood.

The first sign something was wrong on the evening of Thursday, July 28, 2022, came at 11:30 p.m., when Tim Deaton-Conway’s car began washing down his driveway. Tim’s husband Chad had shaken him from a deep sleep moments before. Tim’s first thoughts once he threw on boots and pulled a work shirt over his shaved head and slender frame were with the four purebred shorthorns now trapped in the couple’s barn a hundred yards from their house.

Holliday Farm faces a rock ledge leading up to a steep mountain incline off Route 476, the road running mere feet from the farmhouse’s porch. The elevated two-lane traces the same serpentine path as Troublesome Creek, a forty-two-mile-long tributary of the North Fork of the Kentucky River that flows through Knott, Perry, and Breathitt counties. The farm near the unincorporated community of Rowdy has been in Chad’s family since 1856. The land would’ve been attractive to his ancestors precisely because of the creek, a source of water for them, their livestock, and their crops.

Heavy rains totaling upwards of sixteen inches had fallen since that Monday across Eastern Kentucky. With the ground fully saturated and unable to absorb more rain, creeks and rivers burst from their banks, running like angry bulls down tight holler passageways. When Tim got outside, it was still raining, and the sky was pitch black from the clouds and a new moon. Electricity and cell phone service was out, but he could see a raging rapid rolling past their house each time lightning flashed. It was impossible to reach the barn by crossing the backyard, so the couple, armed with a single flashlight, forded the road-turned-river and lifted themselves up by tree trunks on the side of the steep mountain incline. They dipped back down to swim in through the back of the barn.

Above Holliday Farm sits Starfire Mine, a 7,000-acre former surface mine now home to a grassy plateau, where ninety-six of their cows were safely grazing during the storm. However, three cows and one valuable bull had suffered injuries that summer and were being cared for in the closed barn. Chad and Tim swam to each cow, treading water as they pushed them out of the barn and up the mountain to safety. On their way back to the house, Chad’s flashlight caught the rising water rushing with force just below his foot trail. Tim descended on the path too early, sliding down a muddy incline, but managed to save himself by catching a tree branch, clinging to it as his legs dangled above a rushing rapid below. Chad lifted Tim by his shirt collar, and the men eventually made it back to their porch, where Chad’s mother greeted them with towels. They’d saved all their cows but lost 150 chickens, several cars, and some farm equipment. 

At sunrise, exhausted and mud-logged, Tim and Chad watched Ford F-150s and big-bodied trees float downstream from the head of the holler as fog rose, softly glowing with rose-gold hues from the morning sun. The storm had quieted, and a calm fell over the farm. The day was new, and the couple felt grateful to be alive.

_By Monday morning when I arrived, the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky’s conference room at 420 Main Street in Hazard was transformed into a buzzing nexus of activity. Whiteboards filled with emergency contacts, the tables exploding with laptops and spreadsheets strewn in between half-open Giovanni’s Pizza boxes and mounds of McDonald’s sausage biscuits. I was at work as a staff member of the foundation helping to chart our crisis response. Representatives from local city government and almost every nonprofit and development agency in Perry County moved quickly in and out, along with a bevy of volunteers ranging from teenagers to seniors.

Precise numbers about the scale of the damage had yet to surface, but thousands of people were now homeless and hundreds were still stranded up hollers with no passable roadways or access to drinking water. Aerial footage of the region showed entire downtowns and valleys completely engulfed—sometimes a chimney or peak of a roof’s pitch the only visible sign of what was beneath. Neighbors in boats searched for stranded families, and the National Guard executed dramatic helicopter rescues by hitching survivors to belts before airlifting them to safety.

Barns and sometimes entire mobile homes washed up on the side of country roads, twisted metal and wreckage everywhere. Armored vehicles lined dust-filled downtowns. Children in flip-flops swept debris off the street in ninety-degree heat so emergency vehicles could pass. Volunteers in hazmat suits sloshed through a toxic sludge of mud and sewage to pull film canisters, photographs, instruments, and first-edition books out of libraries and archives.

A crying stranger in a Walmart parking lot told me she lost everything and almost died. I had no words of comfort to offer her. My grief was only interrupted by text messages from organizers and friends.

“Do you have access to someone with another water tanker? They need it in Rowdy. Still no water.”

“I have someone sending a pallet of menstrual pads where should they go?”

“When you come back to the kitchen can you please bring a turkey fryer and some plastic shoes? I’m a size 7.”

“We need refrigerated trucks and generators NOW.”

“Hey. . . I love you.”

Like people in any rural place, Eastern Kentuckians have their fair share of hatchets yet to be buried. Many of us have long histories with one another, and there are people who won’t even make eye contact while sitting in the same room. Long-held personal and political divides linger. But during those flood days, all grudges and feuds seemed to be put on hold to serve a higher purpose.

And then the goblins came.

_The first story I heard came from a husband and wife in Mayking who’d been out driving as soon as the flood waters receded, scouring roads for stranded neighbors in need of help. On Highway 15, the couple saw what they thought were two toddlers. Not at all surprised that two small children could be stranded, separated from their parents, they slowed down their pickup truck. When they came to a slow roll, they discovered two small, gray creatures instead. The couple described each as two to three feet in height, about the size of a two-year-old. One was naked and standing up with a clear expression of disorientation on its face. The other was wearing a leather skirt (the husband called it a “kilt”) and was sitting down on the ground rocking back and forth with its hands on its head. Shocked, the couple sped off and started telling everyone in earshot about flood goblins. Upon hearing this story, I immediately went to Gwen Johnson, a woman I consider an authority on all things mountain. Wide-eyed, I told her about a goblin sighting, and without hesitation, Gwen said, “I’ve seen ’em.”

Gwen is in her sixties and close to the ground, with baker’s hands and a beautiful voice she uses for shape-note singing. She raised her children in a coal camp and has been a fierce local activist her entire life, organizing her community around racial justice and LGBTQ+ rights. In the days following the flood, Gwen transformed the Hemphill Community Center where she volunteers into a relief hub and temporary campsite for flood survivors.

On a late August evening, I gathered with friends to listen to Gwen. In a voice memo on my phone you can hear a friend chastising me for recording, yelling, “Oral tradition! It’s an oral tradition!” I defended myself and the intrusion of a recording device with the insistence that this was archive-worthy audio.

“So this little being. . .This has been two or three years ago and I ain’t told nobody, because I was afraid somebody would bother them. . . so I don’t want nobody to bother them,” Gwen says sternly. It’s a call-and-response with a round of “Sures” echoing from the crowd.

Gwen begins again, “So this little being flew in front of my truck.”

“Wait a minute. . . Flew? With wings?” a male voice asks.

“Yes, with wings.”

A woman’s voice this time, “Like a fairy?”

“Maybe, but it wasn’t a fairy like we think of fairies ’cus he ain’t purty. He was not purty. He kind of flies at the truck and then I’m like, What the fuck? So I slam the brakes and he goes on and then I went back up the road. And probably the people over there thought I’d lost my ever-loving mind, because I was running down that road trying to see him again.”

Gwen thinks the goblin attached himself to the wheel bed of her truck because the creature reemerged when she got back to her house. She described the goblin as small and resembling an elf-like creature she saw in a Harry Potter movie.

“Dobby!” a male voice shouts.

Worried someone would harm the little creature, Gwen drove slowly to lure him back to the holler she found him in.

“So we get down in that valley and I swear to you on all that is holy, there were two of ’em that came out of nowhere and he came out of the truck. Maybe the fender wheel.” The goblins left and disappeared into the dark tree line.

“How much you want for that truck?” a male voice asks, to which Gwen reports it’s already been sold.

“You sell that truck to good people?”

Tim Deaton-Conway was sitting beside me, still recovering from his near-death experience on the farm. For the next several months we declared ourselves the “East Kentucky X-Files,” taking on the roles of agents Mulder and Scully, determined to learn everything we could about goblins.

The next detailed account I recorded came from a paramedic in their thirties from Tennessee who’d had two encounters. Beau Morgan packed their truck with oxygen tanks, medication, and first-aid supplies before heading north toward Letcher County two days after the flood to support medical relief efforts. Beau was surprised when I inquired about any strange experiences, telling me they didn’t know others had seen goblins and were completely unaware of any other accounts. They also volunteered that they don’t necessarily believe in things like aliens or ghosts.

On their first day in the county, Beau hugged hairpin turns, inching their way up hollers in four-wheel drive and going door to door, “Just checking on folks.” At one point while on a small rural route, Beau pulled off quickly after seeing what they thought was a toddler stranded in a ditch. After stepping out of the truck and inspecting the creature, Beau realized it was not human. They wondered if it could be a fawn mangled by the flood and washed downstream to a ditch, but on closer inspection the creature was about a foot and a half tall and skinny, with pointy ears, long fingers, and huge black eyes. Its skin was covered in dirt, decomposing, and looked burnt from the sun. On the upper half of its body, it had a bib-looking shirt made from what they identified as an animal hide.

“I don’t know how to describe it, but it looked exactly like Dobby from Harry Potter,” Beau said. “I was just like, What the absolute fuck? So I left.”

The second sighting happened at a friend’s house. Beau had parked their truck in the driveway after a long day of home visits and was preparing to sleep in the back. While listening to WMMT, the local radio station, they caught a silhouette standing at the edge of the forest looking in the truck’s direction. Beau reported that the creature looked exactly like the other goblin—pointy ears, long fingers, big eyes—but was gray, standing upright, and about a foot taller. This one had on clothes that covered its body, but Beau couldn’t quite make out the outfit in the dark. Just as they texted their friend to come outside because a goblin was in the woods, the radio cut out.

Beau played me a video recording they made while crouched down in the truck. At first you can hear the DJ clearly making announcements and then the signal morphs into high- and low-frequency squeals like someone quickly cranking the knobs on a transistor radio. When Beau’s friend turned on the porch light and stepped outside, the creature retreated into the tree line and the radio went back to normal.

Beau said they didn’t feel scared, but rather in awe of the two experiences. “The feeling I got was like this energy drawing me in. Like they needed help.” Several days later I asked Beau if they’d thought of taking a photo or video of the goblins. Beau answered no, because they were too “gobsmacked” to think much of anything in the moment. “I was also just gaslighting myself. Like, Don’t be crazy!”

After the flood, Facebook pages already dedicated to Appalachian cryptids and cryptozoology exploded with trail cam footage and first-person accounts of unexplainable goblin-like creatures. Mysterious figures were already a staple in Appalachia. We have the Flatwoods Monster, Goatman, wampus cats, and, most famously, Mothman, a seven-foot-tall moth-like creature with red glowing eyes that originally appeared to residents of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1966 near an old World War II munitions plant. Stories about Mothman speculate that it could be anything from an alien connected to UFO sightings to a prophetic apparition that comes in the night benevolently forewarning residents of impending disasters, like the 1967 collapse of a bridge that killed forty-six motorists. Today, a silver metal statue stands in downtown Point Pleasant, welcoming Mothman devotees from around the world.

Bumping into each other on Main Street in between flood recovery meetings, Tim and I huddled together to compare research notes, talking close like the old men standing on the courthouse steps. It was the first time I’d seen him smile since the flood.

In the evenings, Tim and I went down rabbit holes. We watched Netflix series, binged an inadvisable amount of YouTube videos, and listened to every podcast we could find dedicated to unexplained creatures. There, we found stories like that of the Hopkinsville Goblins, an event from 1955 in which a family in far Western Kentucky shot at creatures they called aliens and described as being two to four feet tall and skinny with long limbs and large eyes. The news story gained national attention, as U.S. military personnel from Fort Campbell were deployed to the farm to investigate. Skeptics dismissed the aliens as great horned owls that had descended on the tobacco farm at night and frightened some simpleminded hillfolk.

Still, amateur researchers and detectives now taking up the flood goblin plot pointed to the area’s vast network of abandoned mines and a cave system spanning from Western Kentucky to the most eastern parts of the state. Surely, bloggers theorized, goblins could have been living underground this entire time. Gwen had seen the goblins before the flood, adding evidence that maybe they’d always been here. These theories started to sound more feasible when we stumbled onto the tommyknockers and moon-eyed people.

Tommyknockers are reported by oldtime miners to be small creatures with pointy ears and big eyes, found in the farthest stretches of deep mines, that appear to warn workers about impending disasters. They’re named after a knocking sound on mine walls that sometimes accompanies their appearance, or after a mysterious knock at the door of a miner’s house late at night alerting his wife that her husband was just killed underground. It’s likely these stories originated across the Atlantic with Cornish and Welsh tin and coal miners who immigrated to the coalfields of Pennsylvania and then Kentucky in the early 1800s.

My friend Schon, a member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians of Oklahoma and a Cherokee language teacher, suggested I research Cherokee stories about the moon-eyed people. According to a collection of tales compiled in 1902 that they sent me, when the Cherokee arrived in the North Carolina mountains, they discovered a race of small people. The Cherokee named them the “moon-eyed people,” because they had huge black eyes and white skin, a result of being nocturnal and living underground. According to some stories, the Cherokee went to war with the moon-eyed people over a land dispute and chased the survivors west into present-day Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky. Schon said it’s hard to tell if these were real myths and stories carried by the Cherokee or if they were invented to tell white ethnographers. However, stories about these white moon-eyed people persist in Cherokee oral traditions. Stories about similar small creatures are also found in other Indigenous communities, including the Pukwudgie in Wampanoag folklore and Jogah in Iroquois legends.

Confounded by the possibility of goblins washing out from caves and old underground mines, I went searching for more logical explanations. I’d already begun concocting half-baked theories of my own. Goblin sightings, I hypothesized, were a result of stress. They were likely a mass hallucination brought on to help the human mind deal with the psychological trauma caused by a flood.

My father-in-law, Getulio Tovar, is a psychiatrist who specializes in treating PTSD. Over dinner one night he pushed an article across the table titled “The Neuropsychiatry of Paranormal Experiences” by Dr. Michael A. Persinger, from the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences. Getulio explained that some researchers have found sightings of paranormal figures to be linked to small seizures people have in their right temporal lobe brought on by changes in geomagnetic activity in the landscape around them. The presence people see or feel—a premonition, a vision, a dead loved one—is believed to occur when the left temporal lobe observes the right temporal lobe seizing.

“What is interesting here is that people are seeing the same type of goblin,” he said. “So assuming it’s a credible report, whether they’re having a temporal disturbance or not, they’re telling you the truth about what they’re seeing,” And those sightings and details of appearances align to an alarming degree.

The other discrepancy that didn’t fit was that most of the experiences recorded by the researchers happened at night, specifically between the hours of 2 and 4 a.m. The fact that flood survivors were seeing these goblins in broad daylight didn’t support the paper’s hypothesis, and Getulio said he didn’t have answers for that. The only thing he could be certain of is that most people were suffering from PTSD after the flood.

Unsatisfied with the scientific explanation, I reached for the cultural. Matthew R. Sparks, a local folklorist and author of the dark folktale collection Haint Country, has been collecting stories of ghosts and the supernatural in Eastern Kentucky for years. Like Getulio, Matthew told me that the goblin stories were likely born out of a disturbance: “There are many reasons why folklore emerges out of conflict and disaster. When you get hit with a thousand-year flood or a mine disaster, it’s a way of reclaiming and controlling the narrative.”

He also theorized that goblins provided a way to address a taboo subject in a safe format. “There is a huge conversation that is not being had,” Matthew told me, “that people are afraid to have in Eastern Kentucky about the effects of strip mining on this flooding.” Matthew referenced the intimate relationship many families, his included, have to the coal industry and mining jobs that are now largely gone from the region.

By the 1990s, mountaintop removal mining (MTR), an extreme form of strip mining, had become the preferred way to extract coal seams no longer economically feasible to mine underground. Explosives are used to blow off the tops of mountains, exposing the coal underneath. MTR sites can span hundreds to thousands of acres, like the one at Starfire Mine that sits above Holliday Farm. Overburden is the industry’s term for all the exploded flora and fauna dumped over the side of the flattened mountaintop. In addition to radically altering the landscape, this dumping buries important headwater streams. Hydrologists note that intact mountains act as natural sponges that help to absorb heavy rains and channel them into existing waterways and groundwater systems. With the trees and topsoil gone, many Kentuckians are now living on less forgiving ground.

Matthew speculated that the idea of water washing strange creatures out of the mines into the light of day could be a way to reckon with our mining history. He encouraged me to consider that the image of a goblin cast onto the side of the road reveals a very real and deeply human fear of losing a house, generational land, and a place in the world. This made sense to me when considering a longheld belief in the region that politicians and developers have a plan to flood parts of Eastern Kentucky, creating a recreational area of lakes and vacation homes for the rich. This belief has reemerged and circulated widely post-flood.

Were these hallucinations brought on by the trauma of a catastrophic event? A result of a change in geomagnetic activity? Were people spinning tall tales meant to entertain and distract us from our grief? Were goblins a way to talk safely about fears of dispossession? Or were there actually goblins washing out of caves and mines, as confused as we were about what was happening?

_In the midst of our goblin quest, the disaster recovery work continued. The receding waters revealed forty-five people dead, nearly 9,000 homes destroyed or severely damaged, and thousands of adults and children displaced. Decentralized networks of volunteers and local organizers, including EKY Mutual Aid, mucked out hundreds of homes, delivered tens of thousands of dollars in needed supplies, and distributed cash directly to flood survivors. Between August and December, our team raised and distributed over $13.4 million in funding for flood victims. We distributed cash directly to over 8,000 individuals and families and made grants to small family farmers, small business owners, local nonprofits, and family resource centers, and placed over $6 million into an initiative for rebuilding houses in Letcher, Knott, Perry, and Breathitt counties.

That work took its toll on us individually and collectively. None of us had any prior training in first responder skills or disaster recovery—we were essentially winging it. Our mental and physical health suffered, and we entered that winter heavy with exhaustion.

After a community experiences a physical flood, they then experience many more floods, each layered one atop the other. First, there is the flood of thoughts and prayers. Then the stuff comes. Mountains upon mountains of discarded clothes pile up in gymnasiums and take over the lives of volunteers who unpack and sort each item by hand. Most frustrating is the flood of white paper and red tape from government agencies. In the wake of the flood, FEMA data showed the agency turned down 45% of applications from people who’d lost everything. When I inquired about this, I was told by a FEMA staff person that it’s “normal” to have your first application denied. The next step is for the denied applicant to file an appeal and go through a lengthy process again.

What people need most after a flood is cash and help with immediate supplies and labor related to shelter, transportation, medical care, childcare, and food. Disaster relief nonprofit SBP, formed out of necessity for long-term recovery work post-Katrina, offered some of the most helpful volunteers that came to the region. They taught us the phrase “recovery gap,” a term used to describe the lag time between immediate, often small monetary relief and direct services that individuals receive in the first one hundred days of a climate disaster and the months-to-years-long process of accessing larger needed funds like insurance or public monies to rebuild a house. It is in this recovery gap that people often slip deeper into poverty or are forced to move away permanently. While the state and federal government pledged over $750 million toward recovery efforts in Eastern Kentucky, as of 2025 only a small fraction of those dollars have reached communities due to cumbersome and lengthy administrative processes. Water moves fast; government funding does not.

 _In February, flood waters ripped through Eastern Kentucky once again after nine inches of rain fell over the course of a single evening. Twenty-two people were reported dead, downtown business districts were again underwater, and hundreds of families were displaced—some still living in homes not fully repaired from the 2022 flood. Neighbors, first responders, and mutual aid networks leapt to action, armed with experience and relationships. Beau Morgan drove up to provide free medical care a couple weeks after, this time with a few medical kits they labeled for “goblin use only” just in case. Holliday Farm saw damage this time too, but Tim and Chad were ready with sandbag barriers.

Now, on a warm summer afternoon, Chad drifts in and out of the house to check on the family’s dog, Charlie, while Tim sits on the front porch. A maroon baseball hat turned backward on his shaved head offsets the farmhouse’s bright yellow door.

“It’s still a conversation,” Tim tells me about the couple’s idea to buy an outpost on higher ground while they keep their farm operation going as long as possible. “It would be a huge loss, but being able to identify a place makes sense the longer we endure this.”

Several high-ground communities, new developments made up of affordable single-family homes, are now being constructed on former mountaintop removal sites to house flood survivors. The irony of this is not lost on people. “I think it’s wise we start looking at the mountaintops,” Tim says, his light blue eyes wincing as he looks up toward the sun. “It’s unfortunately something that happened that we didn’t have enough power to stop in the past but is now our opportunity for the future.”

While Tim and Chad plan for that future, life goes on. Chad continues to farm full time and work as a county extension agent. Tim runs a successful arts organization in town. Tim’s life as an artist informs the hopefulness he feels: “For our people, we’ve always had to confront obstacles. Learn and relearn and find a new way to do it. I think it will be a great opportunity for people to see the true value of art as we rewrite what that future will be.”

Kentucky now holds the deadly distinction as one of the top states in the nation for severe weather events. How we will live now with cascading floods, storms, and tornadoes hurtling toward us is terrifyingly unclear and overwhelming. It’s the resolve of Eastern Kentuckians like Tim and Chad to stay and face these events with curiosity, deep care, and creativity that gives me the most hope and courage.

No roadside goblin sightings have been reported of late, and Gwen has asked us not to go bothering them. Tim tells me he thinks the goblins came to help us recover. “People needed something that could occupy their minds and help us heal.” For everyone I interviewed, goblin stories made space in their grief to experience enchantment and awe at the life surrounding them—even as that life came undone. I continue to circle back to the small detail in every story that no one felt afraid of the goblins. Instead, the tellers expressed a sense of compassion and wonder. “Gobsmacked!” as Beau told me. Utterly astounded, shocked, confused d unsure of what to do next, but not scared. These are stories of confronting the unknown without fear. The possibility that if goblins are real, our future holds stories of worlds we have yet to imagine.

An invitation to live into days of astonishing bewilderment.