Most Fortean stories about giant skeletons unearthed in North America lack any real details. Most are being passed along second-hand (or third-, or fourth-,...). There is, however, one intriguing tale from a Kentucky folklore book written by Michael Paul Henson (1984). Henson relates how he actually examined a body dug out from under a large rock ledge along Holly Creek in east-central Kentucky. In 1965, a landowner, Kenneth White, was building cattle stalls under the ledge when he found a "perfectly preserved skeleton" which measured 8 feet, 9 inches in length when reassembled. He states "the arms were extremely long and the hands were large. By comparison, the feet were very small." The skull was "30 inches in circumference. The eye and nose sockets were slits rather than cavities, and the area where the jaw bone hinges to the skull was solid bone. It would seem that the person could not have opened his mouth." A powdery white substance covered the skeleton, but no tools, weapons, or other human implements were found with the bones. The body was buried approximately five feet underground. Henson and the farmer assumed the skeleton to be a large, deformed Indian.

Unfortunately, White reburied the bones rather than taking them to a university for examination. Henson died in 1995, and any further notes he may have had on this fascinating story are unavailable (Henson 1996). I would suggest that further investigation of this tale could produce interesting results. We do not have exact locality for this report, but Holly Creek appears to be run through both Wolfe and Breathitt Counties in Kentucky.

Certainly, the evidence for a true race of giant Amerindians is lacking, but there are certainly other possible explanations for a large bipedal human-like skeleton being found in North America.