‘Paranormal Kentucky’ Takes Readers On Haunted Hunt

This conversation originally aired in the Oct. 19, 2025 episode of Inside Appalachia.

There’s a chill in the air, and it’s a good time for telling spooky stories. Appalachia has a bunch of them. Some have been collected in a new book. It’s titled, Paranormal Kentucky: An Uncommon Wealth of Close Encounters with Aliens, Ghosts and Cryptids. It was written by Marie Mitchell and Mason Smith, a pair of retired Eastern Kentucky University (EKU) professors turned paranormal investigators.

Inside Appalachia Producer Bill Lynch spoke with them. 

The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.

Lynch: Let’s talk about the book a little bit. How did you get to do a book about spooky stuff? 

Smith: Well, for many years at EKU, I taught English 101 and 102 and English 102 is kind of the research class. So, you have to have your students research a subject, and I got absolutely sick and tired of reading endless student papers about global warming. So, I decided I would have them research paranormal phenomena.

Mitchell: Mason’s been interested in that for a long time, and I would probably be traveling with him to do the research. And we collaborate a lot on our writings. I just kind of signed myself on as co-editor. 

But the way we got connected with the University Press of Kentucky is Mason did an interview with the Humanities Council Director Bill Goodman about paranormal Kentucky. Someone from University Press heard him, called him up and asked him to write a book based on his “vast knowledge” of paranormal activity. 

So, it kind of paid off. We’ve humored him all these years, and now it’s kind of finally paid off into a book.

And it’s fun to talk to people about what they believe they saw, and put it in context, historical context or just regional context – and just try to figure it out. It’s like a mystery, a puzzle. Try to figure out if we could come up with any clearer explanations than what’s already been presented.

Smith: Because it is an honest mystery. These are really serious people. They’ve devoted a good part of their lives to researching some of these phenomena. They’re not trying to hoax or make a bunch of money or rip somebody off. They would pass a lie detector test. People have passed polygraph tests. And so we’re thinking, “Well, what’s going on with these people? What did they actually see out there?” 

Mitchell: But the problem is a lot of them were ridiculed by coming forward and saying, “I think I saw UFO,” “I think I saw Bigfoot,” “I think I saw a dog man, Wolf Man, Goat Man…” You name it. It’s harder then to come up with explanations, because you’re not collecting enough data. Because once someone in the community comes forward with that information and description and is ridiculed, then others are reluctant to provide information of things that they might have seen. They don’t want to be in that person’s shoes or being kind of the butt of a joke in their community. 

Smith: And the only way we’re going to go forward with trying to understand what the phenomenon is, is to come up with a good, solid data set. Well, you know, they’ve been making fun of people for 70 or 80 years who said they saw UFOs and aliens. They ridiculed these people. 

So, we don’t have a data set. And suddenly Uncle Sam decides, “Well, we really ought to find out what these uncorrelated targets are.”

They spent all these millions of dollars on the Advanced Aerospace Target Identification Program (AATIP) to try to come up with a data set. 

Well, if they hadn’t been ridiculing all these people, they might have had a better data set, and they could have made some progress on what these things actually are. 

Lynch: Why do you think we’re so interested? 

Mitchell: Well, I think people are naturally curious, and this is something extraordinary that’s happened in someone else’s life. What we try to do is incorporate a lot of history. So, you learn something as you go along, in reading the book.

Smith: And, you know, encountering things that are unexplained, it’s a very human kind of experience. As far back in history as we can look, people have had contact with the numinous, whether it’s in a religious context or a folkloric context. 

Mitchell: And when I was talking to some of the people, I mean, it’s like, “Well, what would I have done in that situation?” 

So, I think people can place themselves in the shoes of the person making the report. 

We were just doing a talk at the Clark County Library in Winchester, Kentucky. Afterwards, a woman came up to us, and she goes, “You know, I saw a UFO.”

And it was years ago. She’s an older woman. She was standing in her parents driveway and she saw this bolt of light. She saw a UFO, a flying saucer, and we’re going, “Oh, what did you do?”

And she goes, “You know, I was just so mesmerized about it.”

And we’re going, “But what happened?”

And she goes, “You know, if they had lowered a ramp. I think I would have walked into it. I would have just gone up with them and traveled with them.”

And it just blew us away, because that’s not the response we expected. That’s probably not what we would have done. We would have just hightailed it out of there and hoped that they weren’t going to follow us.

Smith: Yeah, I would have screamed like a kindergartner and run away. I’m not a brave researcher. I’m a library researcher. I like to read about the accounts, but I would not want to be encountering one myself, personally, in the flesh.

Lynch: With the research, was there anything that you found that surprised you?

Smith: I tell you one thing that really surprised me: Maria and I were investigating a couple of UFO cases, and we did everything we could think of. We went to the place. We talked to as many people at the location as we could. We read all the literature on it. And there were these two UFO events that, at the end of the day, we just had to say, “I don’t know. I had no idea what happened to those people.”

One of them was in 1955, the Kelly-Hopkinsville Incident, where this farm family believed they were under attack by some silver aliens. The other was the Stanford Incident from 1976, where these three women were driving home after a dinner engagement. 

They’re on a country road south of Stanford, Kentucky, near Danville, south of Lexington, and they’re followed by a UFO. They have lost time, and they believed that they may have been abducted. 

None of these people were trying to cash in on it. They were ridiculed by their friends and family members. The stories don’t have happy endings, not because of anything any aliens did, but just because the community did not want to accept that story. 

They were laughed at. 

So, we thought, we’ll really bear down on this and see if we can come up with a solution. 

And I can’t tell you right now what happened to those women.

Mitchell: And I guess what surprised me was that some communities embrace the paranormal, and others just want it to go away. Even though some tragic situations happened, they found a way to embrace it and make it part of their community, lore and history.

Well, yes, of course, they’re capitalizing on it to some degree, but also they’re sharing that history of what happened and trying to make sense of it as well.

Lynch: OK, you mentioned data sets. So, based on your research and the information that you’ve pulled together, does the research kind of lean to the direction that things like aliens and cryptids are real? 

Mitchell: I think when Marie and I are interviewing these people, it is absolutely clear that it is real to them. 

Smith: So, we weren’t skeptics or believers. We were observers, and again, trying to make sense of what they thought they saw. But yeah, they would swear on a stack of Bibles, they would take a lie detector test, and that’s truly what they have convinced themselves they saw.

Mitchell: And we made a deal between ourselves that we would never ridicule our witnesses. We had people sit down with us and do hour-long interviews telling us what they saw. We would never try to talk them out of it or in print ridicule them. We just have to respect our witnesses.

Smith: And some of those businesses are like park rangers and people who are employed with state parks.

Brian Bush, who’s with the Perryville Battlefield Site, says they hear cannons going off, horse hooves every day, and it’s almost like just a day at the office. 

But again, Brian Bush is a very educated man. He’s written books himself about spirits that are still at the battlefield. So, are we going to challenge him? No, I don’t think so. That’s what he believes he hears. 

Mitchell: One of the sources that we cite in the book is a writer named Colin Dickey. 

Colin Dickey has written about ghost stories. For example, ghost stories in the South frequently deal with enslaved people who were brutalized and never got justice. One way that people deal with history that they can’t officially remember, that they can’t tell because their grandfather and great-grandfather were among the people committing the atrocities, they tell those stories again in a ghost story context.

So, Colin Dickey argues that a lot of our paranormal stories are ways of dealing with issues in society that we can’t deal with in any other way.

Lynch: Do you think there are more sightings? Is that pop culture or are people just more open about what they see or think they see? 

Smith: Well, I certainly think pop culture plays an important part in it. In fact, Joe Nickell, who for many years was a lead researcher for the, ”Skeptical Inquirer.” He used to refer to the gray aliens as “Steven Spielberg aliens,” because the Grays were used by Steven Spielberg in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” 

Well, after everyone saw the movie, then people began reporting gray aliens with almond shaped eyes and, you know, little three fingered hands. We do have pop culture deeply influencing what we see, because those are the images in our subconscious that we’re pulling out when we have an anomalous experience.

Mitchell: A lot of those early UFO sightings happened right after wartime, and where a lot of new technology was probably being tested, unbeknownst to the citizens in the area. And there was, again, the fear of being invaded and and bombs and things like that. 

So, when you saw unusual things in the sky, you kind of go to an invasion of some description. A lot of it happened and those reports were on military bases. Kelly-Hopkinsville is near Fort Campbell.

Smith: The Discover Channel has really put a lot of emphasis on Bigfoot Expeditions. The Finding Bigfoot team, that series ran for about six or seven years. And then I think there’s another one called… Is it Expedition Bigfoot or something? 

But I think they’re still in production, and they’ve spent some time in West Virginia and Kentucky and Ohio, and, of course, out west, where Bigfoots were seen all over the place. 

So, there’s a television show on a basic cable network. Millions of people are watching that as entertainment. So, it’s not a surprise to me at all that a lot of people are reporting Bigfoot because it is something we’re consuming in our pop culture, in our diet. Every time you turn on the TV the History Channel or the Discovery Channel, they’re doing Ancient Aliens or Finding Bigfoot or something like that.

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Paranormal Kentucky is available from the University Press of Kentucky.