It is December of 1868, and a fearsome character seemingly ripped straight from the pages of Greek mythology is apparently wandering around the woods near Independent Hill in Virginia, much to the dismay of local residents - who are plagued by terrifying visions and even violent attacks by the monstrous entity...
Taking the Bull by the Horns[]
This image depicts the Div-e Sepid from the Persian epic of Shahnameh, but I felt that it fits the entity described here almost alarmingly well.
A man named Silas Brown is apparently the first person to have come under attack from the menacing minotaur. He lived a nice little house surrounded by foliage indigenous to that section of the country, and was regarded as 'a peaceable and intelligent citizen'. In the weeks leading up to December 18th, 1868 (when the incident was reported to the local paper), he had apparently been suffering from unearthly visions and encounters with a monster seemingly from the depths of hell. The entity seemed to be lurking in the forest surrounding his house, and was often seen in the copse of trees surrounding Brown's barn and stable - around which it was 'seen as often as four times'.
The terrifying visitations came to something of a head when the vaguely-bovine monstrosity attacked Brown one night as he was attempting to feed his horses and other livestock. This attack was so ferocious that Brown was compelled to flee his house out of sheer terror. Brown described the entity as having 'large horns and terrible claws' - the latter of which the monster could apparently contract into hooves at will. The immense creature was 'about three times as large as a man in its front' and had shoulders spanning about 6-8ft. In its natural (if such a thing can be called natural) state, it is of a pale bluish colour, but swiftly assumes a 'deathly white' colouration and somehow emits a small volume of noxious smoke from its surface if approached by any human. On the four ocassions that it was seen around Brown's stable, it would seemingly linger around the area until its sickly-smelling emissions had completely impregnated the surrounding atmosphere.
One evening, no longer wishing to face the ostensibly-infernal minotaur alone, Brown decided to fetch a 'courageous gentleman' by the name of Siger, who had previously been staying at the stable with his wife due to wanting to feed the horses. Siger didn't believe Brown's outlandish story at first, and so went with Brown to the stable without hesitation. Almost as soon as he entered the structure, a large stone fell at his feet with a tremendous rumbling sound. Still skeptical, Siger instantly went to pick up the rock without caring to see where it had come from - but he soon regretted his decision seeing as 'it was so hot that he was compelled to drop it'. When he looked up after dropping the boiling boulder, he suddenly caught sight of the horned apparition 'not over fifty yards from him' and surrounding air quickly was quickly inoculated with the stench of brimstone.
Siger, seemingly ever concerned over his fragile masculinity, did not wish to be seen as a coward and so said nothing of this terrifying event when he got back to the house. However, he did discuss it with his wife as they were walking home that night - and she suddenly became extremely panicked and had to be 'carried home in a state of apparent insensibility'.
A Load of Bull?[]
I would say that this case is unlikely to have really happened quite the way it was said to, seeing as yellow journalism was a common ailment of newspapers at the time, and this story really smacks of something you might read in a modern tabloid like the Weekly World News. The description of Siger's unnamed wife suddenly being overcome with hysteria also seems dated and somewhat sexist nowadays, making me think that this story was likely constructed by a male narrator - possibly Siger himself. That's also a good point - we have no indication as to who exactly is telling this story.
However, despite its flaws on its own, it is corroborated by a story from Kentucky just a year later, which tells that tale of what happens when the Devil Comes to Orange County. It involves another entity described as a minotaur which was somehow capable of producing an aura of toxic gas from its body. It seems that fire and brimstone really might've been briefly unleashed on the United States for a brief few years in the 1860s.
Source[]
I learnt about this case from Albert Rosales's Humanoid Encounters books, but I was able to dig up a scanned copy of the original newspaper, which was the Petersburg Index from Friday, December 18, 1868.