Author: rubberslothbird

Strange things happen in the mountains at night. Deep down in the valleys, mysterious noises echo through the darkness. Terrifying howls travel from hill to hill. Something is roaming through the night. Animals disappear from farmyards. The random things left out in the yard at night — buckets, rakes, clothes hanging on a line — are knocked over or even destroyed. The folks who live in the hills hide in their homes. They know what it is. Whenever anything unusual happens in the night, whenever mysterious calls are heard, they say that it’s the Wampus Cat.

They say that the Wampus Cat was once a beautiful Cherokee wowan. Her husband would often leave the village with the other men to go out hunting and bring back food. Before each trip, the men would gather in the woods to ask forgiveness for the lives of the animals they were about to take and to seek supernatural help in their task. But women were forbidden from ever seeing these sacred rites.

But this woman’s curiosity consumed her. She wanted to know the secret magic. She begged and begged her husband to reveal the rites to her, but he always refused. So one night, as the men set out into the forest, she took matters into her own hands.

The woman wrapped herself in a cougar skin and quietly crept through the woods. She came upon the clearing in the forest where the men had gathered. She hid behind a rock and watched, enthralled, finally seeing the secrets she had so long desired to see. She crept closer and closer to the men in the circle, wanting to take in every detail, until she got too close. The sorcerer leading the rituals spotted her, and immediately saw through her disguise. The men of the tribe grabbed her and dragged her into the circle.

As punishment for breaking the taboo, the sorcerer cast a spell on the woman. The cougar skin she had wrapped herself in became her own skin. She became a strange mix of cougar and human, and was cursed to live forever alone in the woods, never again enjoying human company.

And so the Wampus Cat roams the Appalachian Mountains at night, traveling up and down the hills, in and out of the valleys, forever wandering, ever alone in the mountains. There are some who say that when she steals animals or ruins things on the farms, she’s acting out of her anger and resentment from being cut off the rest of mankind. There are some who say that she will roam the mountains forever, lurking around the places where men live but never able to rejoin them.

And so whenever those strange cries are heard at night, whenever something gets disturbed in those little settlements in the hills, whenever an animal goes missing from a farmyard, the mounatain people know who is to blame. The Wampus Cat is walking through again.

More About this Story

So while the central figure in the story of the Wampus Cat is said to be a Cherokee woman, it’s clear that this is a story told about the Cherokee rather than a Cherokee story. And the Wampus Cat itself seems to go back further than the story as its told today.

The Wampus Cat first came to the attention of the world outside the Mountains in the first half of the 19th century. Although at that time, it wasn’t the Wampus Cat that people were talking about, but the Catawampus, which was a word used to describe the idea of an unknown animal lurking in the woods ad something to blame any unusual event on.

The word catawampus is a complicated one. It has multiple meanings in several American dialects, including identifying a mysterious animal, describing something that’s placed on a corner, and as a term to describe something that’s just messed up or gone awry. This last usage was noted by Folklorists in the late 19th century as being a particularly North Carolinian use of the word, although it has since spread more widely across the Southeastern US.

In its sense as a mysterious animal, catawampus may be related to the word catamount, which was the regional name for the Eastern Cougar. As the cougars themselves sadly disappeared from the woods, so did the use of the word. So sometime in the early 20th century the syllables were transposed and the Catawampus became the Wampus Cat. And Wampus alone is still used throughout North Carolina to describe an unknown or mysterious animal. The story of the animal and its origins as a Cherokee woman first started appearing in the 20th Century, long after Wampuses began roaming the woods.

There’s another twist to the history of the Wampus Cat in North Carolina, this time a little further down from the mountains in Johnston County, along the Neuse river basin. In the spring of 1964, there were a number of reports of an ape-like creature roaming the woods near Dean’s Crossroads, located on US 70 about halfway between Smithfield and Princeton. Multiple people reported seeing an eight foot tall hairy ape-man roaming the woods. The Goldsboro News-Argus called the animal a Wampus Cat, and the name stuck. Hundreds of people flooded the small town searching for the beast until the sheriff was forced to call of the hunt, fearing for public safety, and declaring the whole thing to be a hoax. It’s a story which recalls North Carolina’s greatest monster flap, the Vampire Beast of Bladenboro.

In 1866, a woman named Laura Foster was murdered in Wilkes County. A man named Tom Dula, pronounced “Dooley”, was convicted and hanged for the crime. That murder and the name Tom Dooley live on in one of the most famous folk songs ever to come out of North Carolina.

The traditional version of the story casts Tom Dula as a dashing, handsome Confederate veteran. When Dula returns from the war, he meets Laura Foster, a young woman who was being courted by a schoolteacher from the North by the name of Bob Grayson. Foster fell in love with Tom Dula, but so did another woman, Anne Melton. Melton was married, wealthy, beautiful, and insanely jealous. Learning that Dula was in love with Foster, not her, Anne Melton stabbed Laura Foster to death in a jealous rage.

Tom Dula was blamed for the murder. Dula fled, heading for Tennessee. Bob Grayson headed a posse to hunt down Tom Dula, and the posse dragged the fugitive back to Wilkes County. Dula realized that it was Anne Melton who had committed the crime. Tom Dula’s sense of chivalry made him unwilling to see a wealthy woman dishonored and facing a death by hanging. So Dula confessed to a murder he did not commit in order to save Melton’s reputation.

On May 1, 1868, Tom Dula was executed for the murder of Laura Foster. Grayson returned home to the North. Anne Melton went slowly insane from guilt, and years later as she was on her deathbed, the trees around her house filled with back cats and the air was filled with the smell of burning flesh as demons came to take her soul to Hell.

It’s this version of the tale, a complicated story story that ends in the death of an innocent man, that became immortalized in a folk song that circulated in North Carolina for nearly 100 years before it was made nationally famous by the Kingston Trio in 1958. In a way which shows how much the ways in which we define music categories has changes in the past half-century, The Kingston Trio recording of the Ballad of Tom Dooley reached #1 on the Billboard R&B charts, even higher than its near-top placement on Billboard’s Country charts.

It’s said that Tom Dooley wrote this song himself. The legged has it that he that he was signing it, strumming along on his banjo, as he sat on top of his own coffin riding in the wagon on the way to his execution.

But the actual history behind the story of Tom Dula and the murder of Laura Foster are what might be generously described as slightly different from how he song tells it.

More About This Story

The real story of Tom Dooley and Laura Foster is a lot more complicated than the version told in the song. And it involves a lot more syphilis.

Tom Dula was born in the deeply impoverished mountains surrounding the Yadkin Valley in 1845. Sometime when he was a fairly young teenager, he began sharing the household of James Melton and his wife Anne. Melton was a successful cobbler, and had lost interest in his much younger wife, who happened to be about the same age as Dula. With James Melton’s consent, Tom Dula and Anne Melton began sharing a bed in Melton’s cabin. James Melton slept alone.

Dula left the Melton household temporarily when he volunteered for the 42nd Regiment of the North Carolina Infantry. After the war, he returned to the hills and resumed his unusual household arrangements. But then things began to get even more romantically complicated.

Pauline Foster, a distant cousin of Anne Melton, had moved in to the Melton household when she was hired as a servant. It must have been a small cabin, because soon, Dula and Pauline Foster began having an affair. In a remarkable display of open-mindedness, Anne Melton didn’t object to her lover’s new arrangement. In fact, she joined in. So Anne Melton, Pauline Foster, and Tom Dula were all sharing a bed in James Melton’s cabin. James Melton was still sleeping alone.

As if this wasn’t complicated enough, Tom Dula soon met another Foster. This was Laura Foster, another cousin of Anne Melton, who had recently followed her cousin to the area. Laura Foaster was no stranger to the company of men, and soon she and Tom Dula were carrying on together, in an affair seemingly completely separate from Dula’s arrangements back in Melton’s cabin. Splitting his time between Laura Foster and his menage à trois in the Melton household seemed to keep Dula happy and probably pretty tired.

What Dula didn’t know was that Pauline Foster hadn’t come to the area just to seek employment, she also came seeking treatment for syphilis. As is the way with such things, Pauline gave the disease to Tom, who then gave it to Laura and to Anne. But because of the timing of the appearance of symptoms, Tom Dula thought that it was Laura Foster, and not Pauilne Foster, who had infected him. Dula vowed revenge on Laura Foster.

Laura Foster disappeared on May 25, 1866. That morning, Foster’s father woke to discover both her and his horse missing. The horse returned the next day, but Laura did not. After several weeks of searching, a rope that had been used to tie Foster’s horse to a tree was discovered on bloodstained ground not far from where Tom Dula was living. Suspicion immediately began to fall on Dula, and he fled for Tennessee.

About the same time, Pauline Foster also visited Tennessee, and when she returned to Wilkes county a friend jokingly inquired if she had left because she had killed Laura Foster. Pauline Foster, also seemingly in jest, replied that she and Tom Dula had killed Laura together. Pauline Foster was soon arrested and charged as an accessory to murder.

Fearing for her life, Pauline Foster told everything she knew. Dula and Anne Melton had killed Laura Foster together. She led them to the Laura Foster’s shallow grave in the woods, and her badly-decomposed corpse was exhumed. The body was only identifiable from the clothing, but the evidence of a vicious stab wound under the left breast into the heart was still there.

The police learned that Tom Dula was living in Tennessee, where he’d been working on the farm of a Colonel James Grayson. Dula learned that the authorities were on to him and fled Grayson’s farm. Grayson joined the search party, which caught up with Dula in Pandora, Tennessee. Grayson persuaded Dula to surrender, and Dula was taken back to Wilkes county to stand trial.

In a surprising move which brought the case to national attention, former North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance volunteered to represent Dula pro bono. When the press learned the complicated details of Dula’s sex life, the newspapers went crazy and the trial became a national sensation. The Yadkin Valley region was painted as a decadent bastion of free love, and the public gobbled up as many sordid details as the papers could serve to them.

Tom Dula and Anne Melton were tried separately. Dula was convicted, Melton acquitted. Tom Dula was hanged on May 1, 1868 in Statesville. Reportedly, his last words were “You have such a nice clean rope, I ought to have washed my neck.”

Anne Melton died in 1874, although the historical record is unclear as to wether she died from injuries from a carriage accident or from complications of syphilis. Although she maintained her innocence until her death, rumors that it was Melton, not Dula, who had dealt the fatal blow followed Melton to her grave.

Interestingly enough, though it was the more romantic version of the story that propelled them to fame, the members of the Kingston Trio knew of the sordid details of the story of Tom Dooley, and delighted in sharing them backstage with the various house crews they would meet on tour.

There’s a spot near Murphy, at the far western edge of the state, that the indigenous Cherokee named Tlanus’yǐ, “The Leech Place”, because this seemingly quiet spot on the Valley river was where something dangerous and strange could be found.

The story begins a long time ago, at a place in the Valley River just before it joins the Hiwassee. Here, there’s a thin ledge of rock running across the river which is just passable as a bridge. But just below this natural bridge, there’s a deep hole in the river, a place where the water disappears into cold darkness. All of this is overlooked by a high ridge on on the south bank, with a trail running across it that offers a clear view down into the river.

It’s along this path that one day a small group of Cherokee men were walking. As they looked into the river below, they noticed something strange. It was a large, red, something, as large as a house, sitting on the rock ledge in the river. As they wondered what it was, they saw it slowly begin to move and unfurl. It stretched out its long, flat, fleshy body along the ridge like a ribbon, until that could see that it looked like a leech. A giant leech, whose body covered almost the whole of the ridge that bridged the river. It was a bright red, with white stripes running along its body. The thing lay on the rocks for some time, and then slithered down into the deep hole in the river.

The men were astounded, and even more so when the water beneath them began to bubble and foam, almost as if it were boiling. And then a giant waterspout shot up from the pool, strong enough that it would have swept the men into the river if they hadn’t been wary and ran as soon as they saw it coming.

This was the leech’s trap. It would wait in the depths for unsuspecting people to walk along the ridge, and then send out the waterspout and suck them down into the river. Many unwary people died this way, and their bodies would be found later lying by the side of the river with their noses and ears eaten off.

The Cherokee who lived in the area soon began to avoid taking that path, out of fear of becoming the creature’s next victim. But not everyone was so cautious. There’s the story of a young woman who was walking with here baby by the river and decided she wanted some fresh fish to eat. She walked out along that ridge in the water and sat her child down on the exposed rock, preparing to cast her line into the water. But the river began to bubble and foam, and she grabbed her child and ran out of the way just as the whole ridge was engulfed in angry, foaming water.

Another story tells of a young man who wan’t so lucky. He laughed at the story and said he would show everyone in the town that it was nonsense. So he set off towards that spot on the river, singing about how he would wear leech skin leggings when it was all done. He walked boldly across that ridge overlooking the river, with many people from the town gathered to watch and see what would happen. He got halfway across before the water started to bubble and foam, and a waterspout shot up, dragging him down into the river. He was never seen again.

The place the Cherokee called Tlanus’yǐ is still there. It’s said that even today you can look down into the river and see something moving in that deep hole in the water. But if the water starts to bubble, best to move out of the way, and fast.

About This Story

This story is adapted from James Mooney’s 1900 Myths of the Cherokee. Mooney was an anthropologist who worked for the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnography. Mooney learned to speak, read, and write in Cherokee, and spent years among the Eastern Band in North Carolina compiling books of the religious and cultural practices of the Cherokee nation.

Asheville’s Grove Park Inn has a well-deserved reputation as one of North Carolina’s premiere hotels. First opened in 1913, the Grove Park was built by Edwin Wiley Grove. Grove had made a fortune selling Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic throughout the South. Tasteless, in this case, was a good thing. A malarial preventative, Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic was advertised as effectively disguising the unpleasantly bitter taste of its active ingredient, quinine. Grove’s tonic proved enormously popular in an era when malaria was still a highly problematic disease in the Southern United Sates.

Grove came to Asheville on his doctor’s advice, as Asheville and the nearby towns were popular health resorts at the time. Grove enjoyed the town so much he decided to stay. Seeing the healthy tourist business and not being one to pass up an opportunity to make money, Grove and his friend and son-in-law Thomas Seely began construction on the Grove Park Inn. The Inn was built to rival the finest hotels in America.

The Inn has remained in continuous operation since Grove first opened it. George Gershwin, Harry Houdini, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and even President Obama have all stayed at the Grove Park. Known for its elegance and comfort, the Grove Park hosts several world-class restaurants and a superior spa on site. It’s a beautiful, relaxing, romantic inn that you would never want to leave. And, according to legend, one guest never did leave.

The Pink Lady is the Grove Park Inn’s resident and much-loved phantom. This kindly spirit has been seen and felt in the halls of the Inn for nearly a hundred years. She is said to be the spirit of a young woman who fell to her death from a balcony on the fifth floor of the Inn in the 1920s. She is usually seen in the form of a pink mist, or sometimes as a full-fledged apparition of a young woman in a pink ball gown.

There are various stories about who this young lady was and how she met her end. Some say that she had come to the Inn for a clandestine evening with married lover, and that she threw herself from the balcony when he called an end to their affair. Others say she was a young debutante who accidentally slipped and fell to her death.

Whatever her origins, The Pink Lady is agreed to be a good-natured, even a kind spirit. She seems to particularly enjoy the company of children, and seems a little more willing to reveal herself to them than to adults. She has been seen by the beds of children who were taken ill during a stay at the Inn, speaking softly to them and gently stroking their hands. In one famous case, a doctor who had been staying with his family at the Grove Park left a note when he checked out asking the staff to thank the lady in the pink ball gown, and that his children told him how much they enjoyed playing with her during their stay.

The Ghost of the Pink Lady is also said to enjoy playing small pranks. She’s been blamed for lights, air conditioners, and other electrical devices turning on and off by themselves. She seems to enjoy rearranging objects in the rooms. It’s also been said that she’ll occasionally wake up a sleeping guest with a good tickling on the feet.

While she has been seen all around the Inn, the spirit seems particularly attached to room 545. According to tradition it was from the balcony off of this room that the young woman fell to her death.

The Inn’s employees are used to the presence of The Pink Lady, and treat her as just another part of the tradition of the grand old hotel.

Eagle Nest Mountain stands at the southern edge of the Balsam mountain range and was once home to the luxurious Eagle Nest Hotel, built in 1900 by a Mr. S.C. Satterthwait of Waynesville. Guests at the hotel soon began to hear the story of a strange creature who lived in the area. The thing was not quite a man and not quite an animal — it stood about eight feet tall and every inch of its body was covered with shaggy grey hair, except for its human face. The creature was named Boojum, and he seemed to be harmless enough, but he did have two all-too human habits.

The first of these was the Boojum was greedy and he loved to hoard gems. Rubies and emeralds are found naturally throughout the mountains of North Carolina, and Boojum loved to hunt for these pretty, precious stones and hide them away in his own treasure hoards. Being a thrifty mountain type, he would scoop up the discarded liquor jugs thrown away by tourists and fill these with his gems. He would then bury them in one of the secret caves on the mountain that only he knew the whereabouts of.

Boojum’s other bad habit that made him a little more man than animal was that he loved to look at pretty girls. Back in those days, a young woman who wanted to have a bath might head off into the woods to find a secluded pond at the base of a waterfall. There, safe from human eyes, she could strip down to her naturalness and go about getting herself clean. But Boojum seemed to have some kind of sense about what was going on, and a young woman enjoying herself in the water would often hear a rustle in the bushes and look up to see his hairy face peering down at her.

Now, most of these girls would quickly gather up their clothes and run off back home as soon as they saw him. But one young woman named Annie was braver than most, and one day when she was bathing in a stream deep in the balsam groves on Eagle Nest, she looked up and saw Boojum staring down at her. But Annie didn’t run, in fact, she looked into Boojum’s sorrowful eyes and saw that above all else he was just another lonely soul living on the mountain. Annie fell in love with those sad eyes, and she fell in love with Boojum, and she left her home and her family to go and live with Boojum deep in the mountain woods as his wife.

As much as Boojum loved Annie, and as much as Annie loved Boojum, Boojum still hung on to his love of jewels. On certain nights, he would leave his bride alone and go searching for jewels on the mountain. Annie, growing lonely, would go out in search of Boojum, and she developed a peculiar holler, something that sounded like a cross between a monkey and a hooting owl, that she would use to call out to Boojum. Boojum would use the same cry to call back to her, and eventually the two calls would come closer together until they came together on the hills.

Annie and Boojum calling to each other was often heard by guests at the Eagle Nest Hotel. Folklorist John Parris has said that Annie’s owl-like holler was the source of the term “Hootenanny,” which appeared in the language around the turn of the twentieth century and meant any kind of party or get-together. It was in the 1960s when the term was introduced to the wider public by Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie that it came to mean specifically a gathering of folk musicians.

That Annie’s approach to encountering a giant shaggy beast was to marry him is testament to the well-known friendliness of North Carolinians. It may be that Annie and Boojum had children. for occasionally, even to this day, a shaggy, ape-like creature is seen in the balsam groves of Haywood County.

Chicken Alley is a small, narrow alley in Downtown Asheville. Named because of the chickens that would congregate there in the city’s earlier days, the most prominent chicken found today in Chicken Alley is the one in the large mural by local artist Molly Must that decorates the entrance. But another, non-poultry, presence is said to lurk in this alley.

Dr. Jamie Smith was a physician who practiced in Asheville at the end of the Nineteenth Century. Dr. Smith was known for wearing a wide-brimmed, black fedora hat and a long, duster-style coat. He always carried his medicine bag and a cane with a silver pommel on it.

Dr. Smith was, in addition to being a physician, something of a lover of a good time. Asheville was a rougher city in those days. Men who worked in the logging camps and nearby industries would flood the town on weekends looking for a drink and some company. There was enough money from visiting tourists even n those days to keep the bars and brothels open late. Liquor flowed freely, virtue was easily bought and sold, and Dr. Smith loved every minute of it. There are those who say that the majority of his practice came treating the various social diseases that were the constant companions of the city’s good times.

All of this came to an end in 1902, when Dr. Smith walked in to a bar called Broadway’s Tavern, which was located in Chicken Alley. In a case of remarkably bad timing, Smith happened to stumble into the middle of a vicious bar brawl. He tried to break it up, but was stabbed in the heart by one of the men in the fight. He died instantly.

Jamie Smith’s murderer was never caught. Broadway’s Tavern burned to the ground the year after the fatal stabbing.

Ever since that night, people have reported seeing a strange figure walking in the alley late at night. He’s said to be a shadowy man, wearing a long, black coat and a wide-brimmed black hat. He carries an old-fashioned physician’s bag and a cane with a silver head. People have reported hearing the tip of the cane tapping as he walks along the pavement.

The people who live Chicken Alley believe that this is the ghost of Dr. Jamie Smith. He has been seen for over 100 years, and throughout that time the figure’s appearance has been described with remarkable consistency. Dr. Smith’s fashion sense was apparently distinctive enough to make him recognizable even beyond the grave. The locals are divided as to the reason his spirit returns to the spot where he met his end. Some say he is still trying to stop the fight. Some say he still just wants a drink.

The Nantahala National Forest covers over half a million acres in Cherokee and Jackson counties. Deep in the forest is a gorge cut by the Nantahala river, a gorge so deep and dark that the sun only shines fully down to its floor in the middle of the day. It’s from this gorge that the whole region gets its name – Nantahala, a Cherokee word meaning “Land of the noonday sun.” And at the bottom of this gorge, in a deep, hidden cave, lived U’lag‘û, the giant yellow jacket.

This is a Cherokee story. Long ago, at the beginning of the history of the Cherokee Nation, there was a town called Kanu’ga’lā’ǐ, which means “brier place.” This was generally a prosperous and peaceful town, but it did have one very, very pig problem. This was U’lag‘û.

U’lag‘û was a giant insect. Huge. The size of a house. His enormous size was how he got his name, because in Cherokee “U’lag‘û” means “The Boss” and U’lag‘û was big enough to boss around anyone he wanted. He moved through the air like no other insect or animal, darting, ducking, weaving, and hovering. He moved so quickly could be in one place one second and half a mile away in another.

U’lag‘û was hungry, too. It preyed on the people of Kanu’ga’lā’ǐ, appearing from nowhere, sweeping down from the sky to snatch children and carry them away. It moved too quickly for arrows to bring it down and flew too high and too fast to track from the land. The people tried many times to find its lair and destroy it, but with no success.

Then one day, someone in the town had an idea how to track the U’lag‘û. They killed a squirrel and tied a very, very long white string to its body, then left it for the U’lag‘û to find. The giant insect appeared and and carried away the body of the squirrel, but moved too quickly to be tracked. So they killed a turkey and attached another long, white string to the body and left it for the U’lag‘û to find. It came and carried away the turkey, but still moved too quickly to be followed. They took the leg of a deer and tied a string to it, and the U’lag‘û came and took the leg but still moved too quickly to be followed. Then they killed a young deer. They tied the string to it and left the whole body for the U’lag‘û to find. And that was heavy enough that it had to fly slowly and and they could follow the long string as moved through the tops of the trees.

All the hunters in the village gathered together to follow the string. They chased over miles and miles and miles, until they cam to then end of the Nantahla gorge and saw the giant insect fly down into its depths. From their view at the top, they could see the U’lag‘û disappear into a cave at the bottom of the gorge. The men shouted and ran down into the deep valley after the beast. When they got to the cave, they saw many thousands of tiny versions of the U’lag‘û flying in and around the cave.

Quickly, the men gathered brush and blocked the entrance. They set the brush on fire. The thick smoke blew down into the cave and choked the U’lag‘û and the tiny insects until they died. But some of the ones flying outside the cave survived and flew off, and that’s how yellow jackets came into the world.

About This Story

This story is adapted from James Mooney’s 1900 Myths of the Cherokee. Mooney was an anthropologist who worked for the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnography. Mooney learned to speak, read, and write in Cherokee, and spent years among the Eastern Band in North Carolina compiling books of the religious and cultural practices of the Cherokee nation. His works are the most complete extant written record of traditional Cherokee life.

The story of U’lag‘û is probably the Cherokee story most well known outside of the Cherokee nation. This may be because it bears some similarity to the monster-slaying stories popular in European cultures, particularly the stories of the Greek heroes and demigods which were enormously popular at the time Mooney published this story. It’s important to remember, though, that traditional Cherokee cosmology is highly complex and very different from any European counterparts. It’s also fascinating because it’s a worldview that evolved in what is now the Eastern United States, and so the inhabitants of this cosmos include yellow jackets, possums, raccoons, and other animals, plants, and landscapes that are familiar to us still today. Encountering these stories can be, for the non-Cherokee, a remarkable fresh window on a world they thought they knew.