WV Man Arrested After 911 Calls About Zombies, Ghosts, and a UFO — Then Claimed to Be a Cop

Science13 articles covering this story· 2026-05-18

WV Man Arrested After 911 Calls About Zombies, Ghosts, and a UFO — Then Claimed to Be a Cop

Unidentified flying objectGhostZombieRandolph County, West VirginiaWest VirginiaBill Clinton
WV Man Arrested After 911 Calls About Zombies, Ghosts, and a UFO — Then Claimed to Be a Cop
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Somewhere in the hills of Kerens, West Virginia, a man decided the appropriate response to what he described as a multi-species paranormal incursion was to dial 911. Repeatedly. The Randolph County Sheriff's Office confirmed that deputies responded to the residence after receiving multiple emergency calls in which the man reported zombies, ghosts, and a UFO at or near his home. What they found when they arrived was considerably less dramatic — and considerably more criminal.

According to the Randolph County Sheriff's Office, the man identified himself to responding deputies as a Louisiana law enforcement officer, a claim that raised immediate red flags. No credible documentation of that employment materialized on scene. The impersonation of a police officer is its own legal exposure, layered on top of the false 911 calls that brought deputies out in the first place.

The charges stemming from the incident are straightforward: making false emergency calls and falsely claiming law enforcement status. What they don't explain — and what no official statement attempts to address — is the underlying condition that produced a multi-call, multi-phenomenon emergency report encompassing the full paranormal menu: reanimated dead, disembodied spirits, and unidentified aerial craft, all apparently converging on a single residential address in rural West Virginia.

It's worth being precise about what is and isn't established here. The Randolph County Sheriff's Office confirmed the calls, the response, the claims made by the man, and the arrest. What is not established — what no responding deputy or official statement addresses — is whether the man genuinely believed what he was reporting or was in some other state entirely. That distinction matters enormously for how this story ends, and whether it ends in a courtroom or a treatment facility.

Rural 911 systems absorb a disproportionate share of calls involving mental health crises, substance episodes, and medical emergencies that have nowhere else to go. That is not spin or excuse-making — it is the documented operational reality of emergency dispatch in counties where psychiatric resources are thin and the nearest hospital may be an hour away. Randolph County, West Virginia fits that profile. The 911 system was not designed to be the first and only response to a man experiencing what this call log describes, but in much of rural America, it functionally is.

The false-cop claim complicates the sympathetic read. Asserting law enforcement identity to actual law enforcement is a deliberate act, not a confusion. It suggests at minimum an attempt to control the interaction — to flip the dynamic from subject to peer. Whether that represents calculation or delusion is something a court, or a clinician, will presumably have to sort out.

What the official record does not contain, and what no statement from the Sheriff's Office addresses: whether the man had any prior contact with law enforcement in West Virginia or Louisiana, whether there is any active Louisiana law enforcement credential that could be checked, and what the deputies actually observed at the residence beyond the absence of zombies, ghosts, and spacecraft. Those blanks are not suspicious in themselves — sheriff's blotters are not investigative reports — but they are the questions that distinguish a weird-news item from a story about a person in genuine crisis.

For now, the Randolph County Sheriff's Office has its paperwork and the dispatch system has its logs. The man has his charges. And somewhere in the gap between what he reported and what deputies found, there is a more complicated human situation that the arrest record alone does not illuminate — and that the standard weird-news treatment of this story almost certainly won't pursue.

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