For years some public ground hunters in northeast Kansas have known of a massive non-typical buck in the area. They started calling him “The Ghost” because the buck was tough to pattern, and because a few of them had tried but failed to kill him. Doug Pfeiffer had heard some of those stories, and he’d seen the deer a few times on his own trail cams. And on the morning of Dec. 18, he found himself in the right place at the right time.
“I wasn’t going to hunt that morning because I had an appointment,” Pfeiffer, an Army soldier at Fort Riley, tells Outdoor Life. “But the appointment got cancelled, so I decided to go anyways.”
Pfeiffer went to a public land area he’d already hunted this season. He’d seen some smaller bucks buck there but nothing of size. But as he headed for his tree stand, he decided he’d set up in a new spot roughly 400 yards away.
“Something just told me to move to another spot that morning,” says the 29-year-old hunter. “I got in there a little after 7 a.m. and picked a spot in a fallen treetop to sit on the ground … I thought sitting on the ground with good cover around me would give me a better view, and I sat down there in the treetop for my morning hunt.”
Pfeiffer settled in. After a few hours, he was feeling a bit down on his luck. Then he heard some leaves crunching.
“I thought it was a doe, and then I thought it was a smaller 8-pointer. But then, at 90 yards, I saw it was him. The Ghost. He was coming down a trail, and then into a dry creek draw.”
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The buck was quartering away, and Pfeiffer had to turn slightly to get a shot angle. At 50 yards the deer stopped, and Pfeiffer fired his scoped .300 Winchester. The 150-grain bullet hit right behind the buck’s shoulder, and the deer hunched over after the shot. Then it stumbled a few yards, fell, got up, and fell again.
“The third time he went down he didn’t get up. He only wobbled along for 15 yards before dying,” Pfeiffer says. “I was in disbelief and sat there for 10 minutes just to calm down.”
He called his wife Christina to tell her the good news. Then he rang his buddy Adam Tuttle, who immediately came to help recover The Ghost. After dragging it out and field dressing it, Doug brought the buck to Brad Forbus, a local Buckmasters scorer.
Forbus was already well aware of the buck. He recognized The Ghost from trail camera photos he’d seen. He told Pfeiffer he knew of a few bowhunters who had shot at the deer and missed over the years.
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Forbus estimated the buck’s age around 7.5 years old, and he gave it a BTR score of 206 7/8 inches. He also thinks the rack had already peaked, and he showed Pfeiffer some trail cam photos of The Ghost from the 2021-22 season, when he thinks the antlers would have measured closer to 240 inches.
“I have just the right spot for him to hang in my living room on one side of our TV set. On the other side of the TV hangs a 10-point, 150-inch Kansas buck I shot,” Pfeiffer says. “They’ll look pretty good turned to look at each other like bookends.”
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