Chestnut Ridge

The big year was 1973.

That summer and fall, a researcher in Greensburg named Stan Gordon and the volunteers who worked with him took in more than 100 reports of tall, hair-covered, upright creatures in western Pennsylvania, a great many of them from Westmoreland and Fayette counties along Chestnut Ridge, the long wooded mountain that runs down through the coal country southeast of Pittsburgh.

Gordon has been collecting Pennsylvania reports ever since.

In September of 2007, a hunter from Elk County named Rick Jacobs set a trail camera in the Allegheny National Forest and got pictures of a thin, dark, long-limbed animal bent over on the ground.

The reports come from the country where the timber grew back.

Pennsylvania has more than 2 million acres of state forest now, most of it on land the lumber companies cut and walked away from, and another half million acres in the Allegheny National Forest.

Leon hauled coal off Chestnut Ridge in the summer of 1974, the year after all those reports, driving a tri-axle dump truck from a strip job above Derry down to a tipple by the railroad.

The job ran two shifts, and he had nights.