Bestiary.us

On the morning of September 8, 1967, the body of a female Appaloosa pony named Lady was found dead in the San Luis Valley, Colorado, United States. All of the flesh from the shoulders to the tip of its muzzle was missing; the bones of the neck and skull were as white and bleached as bones that had been sitting in the sun for a year. The skull cavity was empty and dry. A strong smell of medicine was in the air and scorch marks were on the ground all around the corpse. Despite the gruesome state of the beloved horse that once belonged to Nellie Lewis, there was not a drop of blood to be found at the scene. Perhaps more interesting is the fact that there was a set of horse hooves all around the body that did not belong to Lady but to another horse, one whose hooves were reported as being 18 inches wide. Lady was the very first of the muchpopularized animal mutations that continued uninterrupted for the next 30 years in the San Luis Valley.

A necropsy of the horse’s remains showed that it had a badly infected leg at the time of death. A reexamination of the body was made some years later and it was discovered there were two BULLET holes in the animal’s pelvic bone.

Source: Keel, Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings, 84-85; Murphy, Mysteries and Legends of Colorado, 93-99; O’Brien, Secrets of the Mysterious Valley, 9-15; Randles, World’s Best “True” UFO Stories, 83