Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – The Vegetable Man of West Virginia: Grant Town, Blood, and the Making of a Cryptid Legend
In the strange corners of West Virginia folklore, some stories begin in old court records, some in family cemeteries, and some in newspaper accounts repeated from one generation to the next. The Vegetable Man of Grant Town belongs to a different kind of record. It comes to us through the world of UFO newsletters, private collectors, paranormal writers, and the complicated legacy of Gray Barker, one of West Virginia’s most famous and least reliable publishers of strange tales.
The story is usually placed in Marion County in July 1968. A young man named Jennings H. Frederick was said to be walking home after an unsuccessful groundhog hunt when he heard a strange, rapid voice in the woods. The voice sounded unnatural, like speech played too fast. Then, according to the account later printed by Barker, Frederick felt something catch his arm. At first he thought it was briars. When he looked down, the thing gripping him was not a thorny branch, but a green, three-fingered hand.
What followed made the Vegetable Man one of West Virginia’s odder cryptid stories. The creature was described as tall, thin, plant-like, and strangely powerful. Its fingers were said to have needle-like tips and suction cups. The account claimed that it drew blood from Frederick’s arm while its eyes changed color and spun with a hypnotic effect. After the encounter, the creature reportedly bounded away through the woods in long leaps, leaving Frederick frightened, wounded, and unsure of what anyone would believe.
That is the story as folklore remembers it. The harder question is where the story actually comes from.
A Marion County Story in Coal Country
Grant Town sits in Marion County, north of Fairmont, in a part of West Virginia shaped by coal, railroads, family settlement, and industrial change. The town was established in 1901 with the opening of the Federal Coal and Coke Company mine and was named for company vice president Robert Grant. Federal No. 1 remained central to the town’s identity for decades, and early photographs of the mine show a place built around the machinery, tipples, and labor of the coal industry.
That setting matters because the Vegetable Man story is not a wilderness legend from an empty place. It is attached to a real coal-region community, to the woods and hollows around Marion County, and to the broader world of north-central West Virginia folklore. Grant Town already had a place in local story collections and ghost traditions before the Vegetable Man became part of modern cryptid culture. The tale grew out of a landscape where industrial history, rural memory, and supernatural storytelling could easily overlap.
The reported encounter itself was not documented in the ordinary ways historians prefer. No known contemporaneous 1968 newspaper article, police report, hospital record, military record, or official investigation has surfaced to confirm that Frederick was attacked, injured, or examined after the alleged event. That absence does not prove that no story was told privately, but it does mean the historian has to be careful. The Vegetable Man is best treated as a documented piece of paranormal literature and local folklore, not as a verified historical incident.
The Encounter as Gray Barker Published It
The main source for the Vegetable Man is Gray Barker’s Newsletter, published in March 1976. Barker titled the account “The Vegetable Man: A Semi-Abductee?” That newsletter appears to be the first printed source for the Jennings H. Frederick story, at least among the source trail now available to researchers.
According to the Barker version, Frederick was returning home from hunting when he heard a voice that seemed to communicate with him. The message was not a simple growl or animal sound. The voice reportedly said it came in peace and wanted medical assistance. Then the figure emerged as something part alien, part plant, and part nightmare.
The creature’s body was described as thin and stalk-like. Its arms were narrow, but it had surprising strength. Its hand gripped Frederick’s wrist and began drawing blood. The most memorable detail was the creature’s eyes. They were said to shift from yellow to red, then rotate into a hypnotic pattern that calmed or immobilized him. After the blood-drawing stopped, the creature fled in great leaps while a humming sound was heard from the woods, suggesting to Frederick that a craft might have been nearby.
Frederick supposedly went home, cleaned his wounds, and told his family that briars had scratched him. The story did not become public in 1968. In later retellings, it only came out after he shared it with Barker, who then placed it into the UFO and contactee culture of the 1970s.
That delay is one of the main problems with the story. If the encounter happened as described, it involved an injury, a bizarre creature, possible hypnosis, and an unexplained object or sound nearby. Yet the surviving paper trail begins not with a local report from 1968, but with Barker’s newsletter eight years later.
The Frederick Family UFO Thread
The Vegetable Man account also has a second layer. Barker connected Jennings Frederick’s story to an earlier alleged UFO incident involving Frederick’s mother, usually identified as Mrs. Ivah Frederick. In that account, she reportedly saw a small saucer-shaped craft near Rivesville, along with a strange dark creature.
This earlier story is important because it suggests that the Vegetable Man was not presented by Barker as a single isolated fright in the woods. It was folded into a family UFO pattern. Barker’s version claimed that Frederick investigated his mother’s sighting, found marks on the ground, made casts, collected possible hair samples, and photographed the area.
That detail raises an obvious question. If Frederick was careful enough to investigate and collect evidence after his mother’s alleged sighting, why is there no comparable evidence from his own encounter with the Vegetable Man? The story itself says he washed and dressed his wounds and kept quiet because he feared disbelief. That explanation may work inside the tale, but it leaves historians with little to examine.
There are also date problems in the source trail for the related Rivesville case. Some later catalogs and summaries place the event in 1964, while Barker-related accounts have used 1965. A careful article should not smooth over that disagreement. The safest way to write it is to say that Barker and later UFO indexes connect the Vegetable Man story to an earlier Frederick-family UFO claim near Rivesville, but that the exact date and documentation require archival verification.
The best leads for that verification are the Gray Barker UFO Collection at Waldomore in Clarksburg, possible NICAP witness files, and Project Blue Book records for West Virginia UFO reports from the mid-1960s. Those sources may help explain the earlier family UFO story. They do not, at least from what is presently known, provide independent confirmation of the 1968 blood-drawing Vegetable Man encounter.
Gray Barker and the Problem of the Source
Gray Barker is the unavoidable figure in this story. Born in West Virginia, connected to Clarksburg and Braxton County, and active for decades in UFO publishing, Barker helped shape some of the state’s best-known strange legends. He wrote about the Flatwoods Monster, published work connected to the Men in Black tradition, and issued newsletters, books, and magazines through his Saucerian world of UFO material.
He was also known for hoaxes.
That does not mean every document in Barker’s archive is useless. In fact, his collection is extremely valuable for understanding the history of American UFO culture. It preserves correspondence, magazines, writings, photographs, props, and files from a period when flying saucer belief, science fiction, Cold War anxiety, and folklore were feeding one another. Barker collected and circulated stories that might otherwise have disappeared.
But Barker was not a neutral county clerk, newspaper editor, or government investigator. Even the institution preserving his collection describes him as a teller of tall tales and a hoaxer whose dramatic style blurred fact and fiction. Skeptical writers who studied Barker have made the same point. His material is useful, but it has to be read with caution.
For the Vegetable Man, that caution is especially important. The story depends on a single alleged witness whose account reached the public through Barker. There is no known second eyewitness. There is no known medical documentation. There is no known official report of the blood-drawing encounter. The creature was not reported again. The account survives because Barker printed it, and because later paranormal writers and cryptid fans found it memorable enough to repeat.
That makes the Vegetable Man less like a documented monster case and more like a Barker-era UFO tale that later became local folklore.
From UFO Newsletter to West Virginia Cryptid
The Vegetable Man did not become one of West Virginia’s major monsters in the way Mothman or the Flatwoods Monster did. It had no wave of public sightings, no large newspaper cycle, and no immediate community panic. For decades, it lived mostly in UFO books, encyclopedias of strange beings, paranormal retellings, and scattered internet pages.
Yet the story had staying power. It was simply too strange to vanish. A plant-like alien that spoke in a rapid voice, asked for help, drew blood, hypnotized a hunter, and bounded back into the Marion County woods was the kind of image that could survive in the margins.
In recent years, the Vegetable Man has been pulled more clearly into West Virginia’s public folklore world. Local coverage, podcasts, artists, and the Frank and Jane Gabor West Virginia Folklife Center at Fairmont State University have helped turn the tale into a subject for events and creative work. Veggie Man Day brought the figure into a community setting with artists, speakers, vendors, music, and cryptid-themed storytelling.
That modern life of the story matters. Folklore is not only about whether an event happened exactly as told. It is also about what communities keep repeating, reshaping, joking about, illustrating, and celebrating. The Vegetable Man now belongs to that world. He is part alien, part plant monster, part Marion County joke, part West Virginia cryptid, and part reminder of how strange stories travel.
How to Read the Vegetable Man Today
The most honest way to read the Vegetable Man is to hold two truths at the same time.
First, the story is not well supported as a literal historical event. Its main source is a 1976 Gray Barker newsletter, and Barker’s reputation makes the account difficult to trust. The lack of a known 1968 paper trail is a major weakness. The Frederick family UFO thread is interesting, but it does not independently prove the later Vegetable Man encounter.
Second, the story is still historically useful. It reveals how West Virginia became one of the central landscapes of American cryptid and UFO imagination. It shows how a coal-region place like Marion County could be folded into the same broad world as Flatwoods, Point Pleasant, and Clarksburg. It also shows how a story can move from private claim to newsletter, from newsletter to paranormal books, from books to internet retellings, and finally into local festivals and public folklore.
That journey is the real history of the Vegetable Man.
He may not be a creature that once stalked the woods near Grant Town. He may be a tall tale, a Barker production, a borrowed UFO motif, or a story built from pieces of family lore and 1970s paranormal imagination. But as a piece of Appalachian folklore, he has become something more durable than the evidence behind him. He is a strange green figure at the edge of Marion County memory, born in a UFO newsletter and kept alive by the people who still find value in telling the tale.
Sources & Further Reading
Barker, Gray. “The Vegetable Man: A Semi-Abductee?” Gray Barker’s Newsletter, no. 5, March 1976, 10–14. Gray Barker UFO Collection, Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library, Waldomore, Clarksburg, WV. https://www.clarksburglibrary.org/barker-collection
Barker, Gray, ed. “Vegetable Man.” Gray Barker’s Newsletter, no. 5, March 1976. Listed in Kook Science, “Vegetable Man.” https://hatch.kookscience.com/wiki/Vegetable_Man
Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library. “Gray Barker UFO Collection.” Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library. https://www.clarksburglibrary.org/barker-collection
Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library. “Waldomore.” Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library. https://www.clarksburglibrary.org/waldomore
Reed, Daniel A. “The Case of the Vegetable Man of West Virginia.” Skeptical Inquirer 49, no. 5, September and October 2025. https://skepticalinquirer.org/2025/08/the-case-of-the-vegetable-man-of-west-virginia/
Clark, Jerome. Extraordinary Encounters: An Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrials and Otherworldly Beings. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000. https://books.google.com/books/about/Extraordinary_Encounters.html?id=9G7YAAAAMAAJ
Steiger, Brad. Alien Meetings. New York: Ace Books, 1978. https://archive.org/details/alien-meetings_202310
Sherwood, John C. “Gray Barker: My Friend, the Myth-Maker.” Skeptical Inquirer 22, no. 3, May and June 1998. https://skepticalinquirer.org/1998/05/gray-barker-my-friend-the-myth-maker/
Sherwood, John C. “Gray Barker’s Book of Bunk: Mothman, Saucers, and MIB.” Skeptical Inquirer 26, no. 3, May and June 2002. https://skepticalinquirer.org/2002/05/gray-barkers-book-of-bunk/
Sherwood, John C. “Gray Barker’s Legacy: Men in Black, the Philadelphia Experiment, and Mothman.” Skeptical Inquirer, February 2026. https://skepticalinquirer.org/2026/02/gray-barkers-legacy-men-in-black-the-philadelphia-experiment-and-mothman/
Moore, Merle. “Gray Barker.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Last modified February 16, 2024. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/324
West Virginia University Libraries. “Gray Barker and The Men in Black: They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.” WVU Libraries News, May 25, 2021. https://news.lib.wvu.edu/2021/05/25/gray-barker-and-the-men-in-black-they-knew-too-much-about-flying-saucers/
McKee, Gabriel. “A Contactee Canon: Gray Barker’s Saucerian Books.” 2019. https://archive.nyu.edu/bitstream/2451/63886/2/Contactee%20Canon%20-%20Barker%27s%20Saucerian%20Publications%20-%20Final%20revision.pdf
McKee, Gabriel. “‘The Silver Bridge’: Gray Barker’s Psychic Travelogue.” The MIT Press Reader, May 6, 2025. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-silver-bridge-gray-barkers-psychic-travelogue/
National Archives. “Project BLUE BOOK: Unidentified Flying Objects.” National Archives. Last reviewed June 25, 2024. https://www.archives.gov/research/military/air-force/ufos
United States Air Force. “Unidentified Flying Objects and Air Force Project Blue Book.” Air Force Historical Support Division. https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104590/unidentified-flying-objects-and-air-force-project-blue-book/
Center for UFO Studies. HUMCAT Index, 1964. https://cufos.org/PDFs/HUMCAT/HUMCAT_Index_1964.pdf
Gross, Patrick. “April 23, 1965, Rivesville, West Virginia, USA, Mrs. Frederick.” URECAT: UFO Related Entities Catalog. Last modified April 2, 2008. https://ufologie.patrickgross.org/ce3/1965-04-23-usa-rivesville.htm
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Federal Coal & Coke Company Mine, Grant Town, W. Va.” West Virginia History OnView. https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/041557
Marion County Convention and Visitors Bureau. “Grant Town, WV.” Marion County CVB. https://marioncvb.com/company/grant-town/
Marion County Convention and Visitors Bureau. “Veggie Man Makes His Third Appearance in Marion County.” June 28, 2025. https://marioncvb.com/blog/veggie-man-makes-his-third-appearance-in-marion-county/
WV News Report. “The History of Veggie Man and the Upcoming Veggie Man Day.” WV News, July 2, 2024. https://www.wvnews.com/news/wvnews/the-history-of-veggie-man-and-the-upcoming-veggie-man-day/article_6bbcac0e-38bc-11ef-94e3-936974cfb996.html
Hinchman, Amanda Larch. “The Legend of the Vegetable Man: How a Bloodsucking Alien Left Its Mark on West Virginia.” West Virginia Explorer, October 23, 2025. https://wvexplorer.com/vegetable-man-west-virginia/
Hinchman, Amanda Larch. “How an Obscure, Mysterious Writer in West Virginia Influenced UFO Lore.” West Virginia Explorer, October 9, 2025. https://wvexplorer.com/gray-barker-ufo-lore-west-virginia/
Lynch, Bill. “Traditions: The Ghost of Ruth Ann and Other Local W.Va. Lore.” West Virginia Public Broadcasting, March 20, 2025. https://wvpublic.org/story/arts-culture/traditions-the-ghost-of-ruth-ann-and-other-local-w-va-lore/
Fairmont State University. “West Virginia Folklife Center Seeks Paranormal, Cryptid and Ghost Stories for New Publication.” February 17, 2025. https://www.fairmontstate.edu/news/2025/02/west-virginia-folklife-center-seeks-paranormal-cryptid-ghost-stories-new-publication.aspx
Fairmont State University. “Veggie Man Day.” Fairmont State University Calendar, July 12, 2025. https://fairmontstate.libcal.com/event/13673110
Encyclopedia.com. “Gray Barker’s Newsletter.” Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology. https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/gray-barkers-newsletter
Author Note: I approach the Vegetable Man as folklore, not as a proven creature report. What interests me most is how a thinly sourced UFO tale from Marion County became part of West Virginia’s larger cryptid culture.