The first time Daniel Stutler retrieved trail camera photographs of the monstrous whitetail he would later nickname The Ghost, he’d already tagged out for 2017.
The slack-jawed bowhunter from Ostrander, Ohio, was smitten from the get-go, and he was determined to keep tabs on the giant roaming his girlfriend’s family land in Delaware County.
Numerous trail cam photos indicated the deer was spending the winter in a 40-acre section of woods surrounded by crop fields. Daniel’s hunch was strengthened when he found one of the buck’s sheds in the spring.
He got only two images of The Ghost in the fall, however, the last on Oct. 9. He thinks he might’ve seen the deer among others in a cut soybean field two days later.
Unable to forget what he’d seen in the bean field and unwilling to entertain the thought that his dream buck wasn’t in the group, Daniel walked right past his usual stand on Saturday morning, Oct. 13.
“I didn’t want to take my stand down, carry it to where I thought I needed to hunt, and put it back up,” he told John Phillips, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “I felt sure that would spook the buck I wanted to take.
“I wound up walking quietly past my stand to sit on the ground nearer where I’d seen deer the previous days,” he added.
Daniel cleared the leaves from the base of a large oak near the edge of the field, and then he sat.
A stick breaking first alerted him to the approach of a deer, which turned out to be none other than his dream buck. It was 45 yards away, raking a sapling with its antlers.
When The Ghost eased behind a copse of trees, Daniel quickly ranged the distance at 35 yards. Confident, he rose on his knees and drew his bow.
The thwack came as soon as the animal stepped in the clear.
He didn’t search for the deer, which had collapsed at the end of a 70-yard dash, until the following day.
It took three people, straining, to wrangle the animal onto the back of an ATV.
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