By Steve Huffman
shuffman@salisburypost.com
ROCKWELL ó It was two nights after Halloween, so you’d have thought all ghouls and goblins would have been safely back in their lairs.
But a motorist traveling Old Beatty Ford Road learned differently Sunday night.
London has Jack the Ripper and New York City has Son of Sam.
Now, Rowan County has “Hogzilla.”
Kenneth Miller was watching television in his house at 13360 Old Beatty Ford Road ó about a half-mile from Emmanuel Church Road ó shortly after 8:30 p.m. Sunday when he heard a crash.
“It sounded like one car hitting another car,” Miller said. “I was expecting the worst.”What he got instead of a car crash was a wild hog. A darn big one.
Miller said Kelly Barringer, 43, of Albemarle, was driving a Chevrolet Suburban along Old Beatty Ford Road and struck and killed the wild boar after it lumbered into the road in front of him.
“He told me he saw it a split-second before he hit it,” Miller said.
It took Barringer a ways to stop. He turned around and returned. Miller hustled from his house, the first to arrive with a flashlight.
He approached the dead boar from its backside. The creature was stretched out in the roadway, steam still rising from its hide.
“I thought it was a bear at first,” Miller said.
Eventually, he and a handful of others investigated the creature more closely and saw it was a boar.
A very, very distant relation to Piglet.
Miller said he stepped the creature off and determined it was 6-feet long from the tip of its tail to the top of its snout. He estimated its weight at at least 300 pounds.
“I weigh 200 pounds and I’ll bet it’s twice as big as I am,” Miller said.
Where it came from is anybody’s guess. Miller said his beagle has been barking at something in the dark on recent nights.
He wondered if the dog was yapping at the hog hiding in the woods, doing whatever it is that 300-plus-pound hogs do.
Miller said he was certain the hog wasn’t a domestic animal that escaped from a neighboring pen. It had two tusks, Miller said, though one had apparently been broken off in its collision with the Suburban.
“It was as wild as could be,” Miller said of the animal.
Tommy Rainey is another resident of the area and showed up at the accident site with a camera. He said the Suburban’s collision with the boar did considerable damage to the front left side of the vehicle, knocking a hole in its radiator.
The Suburban had to be towed from the scene, Rainey said.
Miller, meanwhile, said the N.C. Highway Patrol trooper who investigated the accident said there was some confusion when the call for help was issued. Officers, he said, thought a motorist reported hitting a “board.””He said he thought somebody had hit a 2-by-4,” Miller said of the trooper, laughing.
The trooper investigating the accident was not immediately available Monday because he was en route to Raleigh, but later that night he called the Post and described the extensive damage to the side of the Suburban, which is a pretty hefty vehicle. He said he was not surprised at the estimated weight of the animal. “That was some big pig,” he said.
Miller said those at the scene joked with the trooper, telling him they had the hog if he had the slaw.
Miller said the boar was eventually carried away by another local resident.
“There’ll be some nice hams on that hog, I tell you,” Miller said.