Halloween has long been one of the Buckeye State’s biggest yielders of bodacious whitetails, but that’s not why Levi Lease chose to go hunting last Oct. 31.
The hunter from St. Louis, Ohio, had planned to spend much of his day sitting inside a dirt track racecar rather than a deer stand. He changed his mind only because he and his crew chief, Cody Disbennet, decided the crowded field for the year’s last race would lead to more accidents.
The event attracts a lot of drivers eager for one last chance at a season-salvaging win, and Levi and Cody didn’t relish the chance of beginning the 2021 circuit with a damaged car. Instead, they went to the Lease family’s 15-acre farm in Licking County.
Cody was relatively new to bowhunting, and he’d never arrowed a buck. The hilltop farm had plenty of antlered deer, including one Levi had been tracking for six years through trail camera photographs.
While his most recent images were all blurry, he thought the bull of the woods would top 185 inches. Neighboring landowners had better photos of it, and they were hunting it as well.
Levi’s stand that day was a lock-on model that had not been hunted to that point. His choice was validated 20 minutes after he settled into it, when five bucks chased a doe through the area.
The sixth buck on the trail, lagging behind the others, was the local legend himself. The shot was perfect. Only afterward did Levi feel the leg-numbing jitters that had been overridden by the experienced archer’s autopilot.
“Shaking like a leaf, I had to sit down quickly. If I hadn’t, I might’ve fallen from the stand,” Levi told John E. Phillips, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “I had to get my emotions under control.”
Levi and Cody began tracking the deer together, and they didn’t have to go far. The animal had collapsed 25 yards into its retreat.
Cody, well aware of the 20-pointer’s ghostlike nature, nicknamed it Beetlejuice. The 221 3/8-incher will be the 10th to hang on friend’s wall.
— Read Recent Blog! Two Seasons and 45 Inches Later: Doug Hampton passed up a 170-inch whitetail in 2018, only because his outfitter promised he could return to Iowa and hunt it after it had “grown up.”