Across Appalachia, thousands of people keep reporting the same thing: a massive black cat in the woods that screams like a woman being murdered. The government says it doesn't exist, there are NO official reports of big black cats in the area.
But the Cherokee had a name for what lives in those mountains, and its story is far older, and far more wicked, than a misidentified panther.
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TRANSCRIPT
The other day, I was browsing reddit when I noticed something very strange I want to tell you about
Theres a bunch of people in Appalachia, who have all reported seeing the same creature in the woods. It’s Something that none of them can explain.
It started with this story I read:
Appalachian Baby (4 years ago)
In 2007 I was DD (stone cold sober) for my boyfriend and friends. He and I went back to his parent's house (Southern WV). His parents were out of town and he was piss drunk so I got him put to bed and went out back to have a smoke. Typical house up a holler sitting at the bottom of the mountain, with about a half acre fenced in running up the hillside. I didn't turn a light on and it was typical Appalachia dark. Sat down on the porch swing, lit up, and all of the sudden hear what sounds like a woman being absolutely bloody murdered about 100 feet away from me. I threw my cig and got in the house QUICK. Turned on the porch light/flood light and saw a what can only be described as a huge black panther running back and forth inside the fence absolutely screaming and screeching it's head off because I guess it thought it was trapped in the fence once it jumped in. Watched it until it figured it out and jumped back over and ran off up the mountain. I think only one person has ever truly believed me.
And people immediately started chiming in that they had the same experience with this panther creature or they knew someone who had, too
Another user who has since deleted their profile wrote:
u/Deleted
I 1000% believe you. I am actually in SW Virginia about an hour or so outside of Roanoke. I live in the middle of nowhere. I, too, was doing the same as you. But it was like 5:30am and I was about to leave for work. This was in the middle of winter and was still pitch black. After smoking about half of my cigarette, I heard the same exact noise and every inch of my body was covered in chills. Horrifying especially being outside on my back porch, basically in the middle of the woods by myself. I threw my cigarette and hauled ass into the house to finish getting ready. I couldn’t find my flashlight during this so I couldn’t shine it to see but after explaining this situation to my elderly neighbor that evening after work, I was told that the same thing happened to her about 20 years before my incident. There is actually a story local to me called “the woman at panther rock,” where she was brutally attacked by a panther and had succumbed to her injuries on this very large boulder that sits by the road on the way to my house (walking distance). My neighbor is huge into folklore, and she claims that the beast still may live today. I never go outside at night by myself anymore here at home. I make my BF go with me, or I bring my 9MM with me if it’s emergent.
Another person said:
I grew up in Pennsylvania, and I am certain I witnessed one stalking through a neighbor's pasture. It possessed a remarkably lengthy tail and cleared a five-foot fence with effortless grace.
Though I only caught a glimpse of its backside, we used the surrounding treeline for scale, and the creature was undeniably the size of a mountain lion.
After speaking with local old-timers, some claimed that cougars could, on very rare occasions, be born with jet-black fur. However, my own research suggests that a melanistic mountain lion has never been scientifically verified in the wild.
Now, this sent me down a rabbit hole. I didn’t think there were panthers in Appalachia, so I looked it up, and there’s not. there are no cougars, panthers or other large black cats, yet this thread goes on and on and on with people claiming to have seen the same type of large black cat that makes a horrible sound.
So… I kept looking into it because I was intrigued, and I found more threads of people annoyed because they, too, had seen a big black cat, but then they were told by the government that they hadn’t.
That’s right, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service kept making statements that there are NO LARGE BLACK CATS in Appalachia at this time. They insisted that what people were seeing were either bears or house cats. People felt like they were being gaslit.
But how could this be, how could so many people say they’re seeing the same thing, when official reports keep reiterating that they’re not? Well, that’s what i want to talk to you about today, because the more I read, the more I realized that some of the locals know that this isn’t just a big black cat in the backwoods, but a strange type of creature that’s been in the Appalachian forest longer than people.
They call it, the wampus cat.
And the more I read about this cat, the more I realized that there is a strange, human like quality to it that people describe. Here’s another story of a local appalachian woman in north carolina who has encountered the Wampus cat on multiple occasions, and knows a bit more about its backstory. She writes
/Thetruthishere • 6 yr. ago North Carolina Wampus Cat
I’m a stable, relatively successful mother and wife living in the Deep South, right on the coast. I have spent my entire life in this particular beach community.
If you travel just a few miles inland from the ocean, you find yourself deep in the rural countryside.
My mother’s family has deep roots here, while my father is Sioux; his mother relocated him here as a young boy to move away from the reservation.
For as long as I can recall, my maternal relatives have encountered the Wampus Cat.
The folklore changes depending on the region, but the local lore claims she was a Cherokee woman who surreptitiously followed the men to a restricted ritual involving the chief and a shaman.
She utilized a mountain lion’s pelt as a shroud, but when she was discovered, the shaman cursed her to remain in that form forever. Now she haunts people, though her motivations remain a mystery.
However, this entity trails me and my kin. It always has.
We have become so accustomed to her presence that we simply anticipate her arrival whenever we move houses, during the transition of seasons, or when we are struggling with our emotions.
Back in the 1980s, my mother had a particularly difficult day being picked on at school, and she was heading home on her bicycle along a dirt path, weeping.
The sun was beginning to dip, though it wasn't dark yet. Suddenly, she heard a piercing shriek from behind. I’ve heard it myself; it resembles an eagle’s cry but carries the deep, guttural rasp of a cougar.
She glanced back and spotted a massive, dark-furred beast. It moved in a knuckle-walking gait similar to a gorilla—crouched low in the rear with its chest held high, supported by its arms.
She pedaled furiously until she reached safety. When she recounted the sight to her mother, my grandmother simply remarked, “That’s just the Wampus Cat.” And they left it at that.
I grew up with a father who was deeply superstitious and would practically dive for cover when we heard those screams in the night,while my mother and grandmother would just casually note that the cat was back again.
I have lived my whole life viewing this as perfectly ordinary.
Even after getting married, my husband and I would be near the treeline and hear that wail, watching the dry leaves stir as something tracked our movements.
It stayed at a distance, and I had to realize that for outsiders, this was terrifying. To me, it’s about as noteworthy as spotting a cardinal in a tree.
It's a break from the routine, sure, but nothing truly shocking.
The closest I ever got to it was during high school. My friend, her boyfriend, and I were on the porch, taking in the humid night air and the fireflies.
A massive, hairy beast the size of a gorilla charged toward the porch and let out a hellish scream. I might be used to the creature, but I don't want it five feet away.
We retreated to her room and heard it pacing beneath her window for an hour (houses here are often on stilts due to storm surges.)
It was growling, hissing, and thrashing in the bushes, acting generally irritable. Eventually, it moved on, the night went quiet, and we slept.
I still hear it every so often. It's just a reality of living here.
This region is thick with ghosts. I grew up near the Fort Fisher site and many other places marked by history and tragedy.
I have too many strange stories to share in just one sitting.
But that's the gist of it.
This user ends her story with….
I hope this was informative, and stay indoors after dark on the Carolina coast if you're faint of heart!
[SEGMENT 1: THE WAMPUS CAT]
The Wampus cat is typically described as being dark colored, about the size of a mountain lion or cougar, and…odd. Sometimes it will get up on its hind legs and walk like a human. Other times it’ll shriek like a woman being murdered. Sometimes, its large yellow eyes will just follow you from the dark brush.
The name comes from the word Catawampus, which means askew or odd
In parts of East Tennessee, the Wampus Cat isn't classified as an animal at all. It's a spirit — something older and stranger than zoology could ever explain. It's a creature of the earth, tied to the land itself, they say.
And the belief that runs through these communities goes like this: if you hear the Wampus Cat scream, someone nearby is going to die. They'll be dead and buried within three days. Some versions are even more specific — hear the cry three times, and it’s one of your loved ones who is set to die.
Parents tell their children, plain as anything: don't stray past the treeline after dark. The Wampus'll get you.
And the legend of the cat is what the woman in the story described. a Cherokee woman one day became curious about the men's sacred hunting ceremonies. As a woman, she was forbidden to witness these rituals, so she disguised herself under a mountain lion's skin and creeped close enough to watch.
She hid among the brush, holding her breath so as to not make a sound, but before she knew it, her tribes medicine man was behind her, pulling her up by her hair.
as punishment, the medicine man bound the animal skin to her body permanently, fusing woman and cat together at the bone. She was forever trapped. Half-human, half-cougar, and cast out of the village and doomed to roam the Appalachian mountains alone forever, crying out in a voice she can no longer fully control.
One of the earliest written accounts of the Wampus cat is from Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1918. The city sits in a valley cradled by the Great Smokies to the east and the Cumberland Plateau to the west. And that fall, something started killing livestock across the north side of town, brutally. Wild dogs in Fountain City were found with their hearts and livers ripped clean out of their bodies. A mule was mutilated in Whittle Springs. Chickens in Inskip were found torn apart, as if every feather had been meticulously plucked from their body.
Now, whatever was doing the killing, nobody could catch it. A zoologist at the University of Tennessee examined the remains of some of the animals and couldn't identify the predator from the wounds. The Knoxville newspapers put a name to it, a name people had been passing around word of mouth in appalachia for generations— the Wampus Cat. They described the creature as dark colored with white spots, with a long tail, able to jump twelve feet in a single bound.
On Thanksgiving morning, 1918, roughly seventy-five men — armed with shotguns, rifles, and a handful of bow and arrows — fanned out across the north Knoxville hills to capture the beast. A hundred-dollar reward was posted for anyone who could bring in a carcass.
But Nobody claimed the reward. The creature was never found. The killings eventually stopped on their own. And the name stuck.
It wasn't the last time, either. In 1929, witnesses in Knox County reported an upright-walking cat that left strange tracks and howled in a way that didn't match any known animal. In 1964, a group of hunters near Knoxville described something with luminous eyes and a scream unlike anything they ever heard. As recently as 2016, a resident in Pleasants County, West Virginia, told the Travel Channel's Mountain Monsters that he'd been losing pigs to a creature he'd first seen as a child — jet black, with glowing eyes and a high-pitched cat like hiss.
So what is the official response to all of the claims each year from people who have seen this creature?
Well, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service admitted that cougars DID use to live on the east coast. However, The last confirmed wild eastern cougar was killed in Maine in 1938 and they were officially declared extinct in 2018.
And Mountain lions don’t carry the gene for a black coat.
So when biologists review the thousands — thousands — of "black panther" sightings reported across Appalachia every year, the answer they give is always the same: black bears seen moving quickly, large dogs, bobcats in low light, or house cats photographed without a size reference. They’re literally telling these people they’re out of their minds!
And this, to me, seems to be a trend in the area. People today seeing and hearing the same things that people hundreds of years also saw, and still being told they’re imagining things.
*did any of you grow up with legends like this?
And that brings me to the next strange thing that’s happening in the Appalachian woods that I want to tell you about…
[SEGMENT 2: SPEARFINGER]
This one starts with a story from reddit user Rach1874, who wrote this post a year ago.
•1y ago•Edited 1y ago
My uncle (mom’s brother) has had a farm in south east WV since the seventies, long before I came into this world. Mom is the oldest of 5 and my uncle built a bunch of houses on the farm so family could use it whenever. Some lived there and other, like my family, visited often.
My mom and older sister and I would go for weeks on end to spend time with family and I always loved it because I have a ton of cousins and was the baby for a long time so mostly I tagged along with my cousins and felt extremely safe like it was my happy place. I don’t really remember anything totally out of the ordinary when I was really little. Other than I remember an imaginary friend whom I exclusively played with at the farm, no where else, and we moved extensively for dad’s job so I’ve lived in many different places.
What I remember after age 5, was suddenly being old enough to not have to have someone walk me to and from other houses which I thought was so cool! So I used to explore. My uncles liked to bow hunt and had taken me a few times not too far into the woods so I was able to go back on my own and find their little tree platforms they had built to hunt from. I thought they were cool little treehouses.
It was the winter, I wanted to be out in the snow and explore. So I found my way up the mountain (that is what I called it but in fact it was probably just a massive hill) and into the trees, I couldn’t find the spot I was looking for and got pretty frustrated with my 8 year old self. So I sat down by a creek to catch my breath and figure out where I was.
I couldn’t have been sitting more than about three minutes when something let out a scream I can only describe as blood curdling. I thought it was a fox most likely, until I heard another voice crying, just weeping and wailing and the sorrow was palpable.
My cousins had always told scary stories about Appalachia and I figured that they had followed me into the woods and were trying to scare the pants off me for shots and giggles. I called out like ok guys, not funny! Ok I’m going home. Enough! And followed my footprints in the snow as fast as I could back to the farm.
The screaming and crying didn’t stop, stayed consistent as I moved, which really made me convinced it had to be my cousins. I don’t think I heard words just crying and screaming. But it wasn’t pleasant.
Made my way back to the main house (my uncles house which was the biggest on the property and visible from the edge of the woods) and absolutely booked it, ran full tilt to get to the kitchen door. I remember getting through the door and slamming it behind me because I was a combo of terrified and annoyed that my cousins were playing a prank on me (the next closest cousin in age is 9 years older than me and so I was often the butt of pranks).
Well wouldn’t you know every family member was accounted for in the living room/kitchen. The older male cousins and my uncles were in the kitchen putting their snow boots and coats on to come look for me I had apparently been gone for several hours and they were worried.
According to my mom I was white faced, my hands were covered in scratches through my mittens, I guess I must have fallen or something. They were so worried I had disappeared. I should add I set off from my aunts to walk to my uncles and had decided to take a detour and didn’t tell anyone. Oops. I was 8, and really didn’t think about how that might be bad.
Mom said I looked like I had seen a ghost. I asked if anyone had come out to the woods to look for me, they said no we’ve been looking at the different houses and were just about to come look for you because they saw my footprints head into the woods.
I told them about where I went and what I heard and my uncle, whose property it was, said “ah oh, I think you probably ran into the witch.” I’m over here thinking oh some crazy lady lives in the woods and I probably stumbled near her cottage.
Nope. The witch was just what they called the unknown entity that roamed the woods, screaming, crying, mimicking people’s voices and just giving people a good old sense of doom and dread. No one had a straight answer about possible folklore or anything like that but all my older cousins had their own experiences with similar happenings over the years.
Scared the living daylights out of me and while I’ve been back to the farm over the years I can tell you I have never once set foot near the woods tree line. Even as an adult. I was grateful my family didn’t think I was crazy, but they said a general rule is not to be in the woods alone. So I listened. To my knowledge nothing physical ever happened with anyone and this entity, more of a prankster than anything. But oof. The Appalachia has some wild stuff.
Nearly everyone in Appalachia has a story about a witch. I mean, my grandfather who grew up there has a story about a witch that lived in the woods behind his house.
It’s a well known thing there. You don’t go into the woods, because that’s where things you don’t understand live
Well, what I found is a lot of the stories you hear today about Appalachia. The witches in the woods, the voices that sound like someone you know, a lot of them originate from an ancient witch story. The story of Spearfinger.
[2B — It echoes something far older]
The Great Smoky Mountains rise along the Tennessee-North Carolina border like a wall of blue haze — that's where the name comes from, the Cherokee word for, "place of the blue smoke." These are among the most biodiverse forests on Earth: old-growth cove hardwoods, two hundred species of birds, a fog that crawls through the valleys in the early morning and doesn't burn off until well past noon. The Cherokee lived in their shadow for more than a thousand years — in the Overhill towns of Chota and Tomotley along the Little Tennessee River
In those mountains, the Cherokee told a story about something that wore a familiar face and called to you from the mist.
A monster they named, and feared, and eventually killed. They called her. Spearfinger.
[2C — History of the legend (authentic Cherokee)]
Spearfinger was an ogress once called "a terrible woman monster, whose food was human livers."
In her natural form, she looked like an old woman — stooped and frail But her entire body, every inch of skin, was as hard as rock. Arrows bounced off her. Spears shattered on contact. The Cherokee called her "Stone-dress" — because nothing could pierce her.
On her right hand she had a single finger sharpened to a point, made of bone or stone, hard as obsidian, long as a spearhead. That's what gave her the name: Spear Finger
And she could become anyone. A grandmother from a neighboring village. An aunt you hadn't seen since last winter. A friend's mother waving from the trail with a warm smile. She would find children alone at the edge of the woods — picking berries, gathering chestnuts, playing where the trees thin out and the adults can't quite see — and call to them in a voice they recognized and trusted: come, my grandchildren. Come to your granny and let granny dress your hair. And the child would come. Because why wouldn't you? She looked like someone safe.
She'd sit the child down, begin combing their hair — gently, lovingly, humming — and while the child relaxed into the familiar comfort of the touch, she would slip that stone finger through the back of their neck to kill them quickly or into their side and take the liver.
her victims didn't know they'd been stabbed.
There was no wound. No mark on the skin. No blood. No pain. Nothing at all. The child would stand up, thank the kind old woman, walk home, eat dinner, go to sleep. They’d feel completely, fine. but then, over the next few days, they would begin to weaken. Just a little at first. Tired more easily. Less appetite. Then more. They'd grow pale. They'd thin. And they would die. Because Spearfinger had slowly drained their life force.
And she had a song. Hunters alone on the mountain at dusk would sometimes hear it drifting through the trees — low, almost to herself:
Liver, I eat it. Liver, I eat it.
You can see in the story of spearfinger some of the blueprint for other appalachian legends.
I mean, how many times have you heard the story; Someone is alone in the woods — deep in the Smokies, when they hear a voice. Specifically — the voice of someone they know. A mother calling their name. A friend saying "come here." A partner shouting from just past the next ridge, just a little deeper into the trees.
And the advice that follows these stories, from people who grew up in these mountains, is always the same: do not answer. Do not follow it. Turn around and walk the other way. Because whatever is calling to you is not the person it sounds like.
That’s what spearfinger does, she speaks to you from the forest in a voice that draws you in
The fact is, these stories are still happening today. So whether it’s spearfinger herself, or if spearfinger was just the name that the cherokee gave the voice calling to them from the woods, something is out there.
And it made me think of this story. This author writes:
This happened to me in January of 2019 in Western North Carolina around the small town of Sylva. I was participating in a week-long program to get certified as a First Responder for wilderness first aid and rescue. I am studying to become a forester and it is important to know how to keep people alive in the woods when things go wrong.
There are two primary locations in the complex, a classroom with some bathrooms and a kitchen where we spent most of the day in class and ate meals. There is a group of one-room cabins on top of a steep hill directly north of the classroom where we would sleep. An important thing to note about the cabins is the heating system. Each cabin has a small, but powerful, radiator in it that makes the cabin feel like a sauna if left on for too long. Since it was January in the Appalachians, it was pretty chilly outside at night, so the heat was needed. To strike a balance between boiling in our beds and getting hypothermia, we would turn on the radiator and leave a window open so that warm and cold air could circulate and create a reasonable temperature. The radiator and the open window were at the front of the cabin, next to the door, and my bed was directly across from the window.
The incident happened on the 5th day (a Thursday) of my time there. My boyfriend and I (who was enrolled in the program with me) had settled down for the night in the cabin we shared with one other person. We had gone to sleep as normal and were sleeping soundly on two bunks that we had pushed together so we could sleep next to each other. Sometime during the night, I was woken up by some shuffling on the other side of the room near the window. I heard my boyfriend say in a complaining voice "Can't we close this window? I wake up feeling frozen". I woke up more and sat up in my bed groggily, about to answer him, when I heard another voice say, "If we close the window, it'll get too hot and we'll wake up sweaty." I snapped awake and froze where I was sitting.
The voice that had "responded" was my voice. There is something very strange and wrong in hearing your voice repeated back at you. In the dark, I looked down next to me where I saw my boyfriend sleeping soundly. At this point, a mortal dread had a tight grip on my chest and I forced myself to not move or even blink. I was focused intently on the place near the window, fearfully anticipating more of my own words. I heard more shuffling outside the window and my same words were repeated, "If we close the window, it'll get too hot and we'll wake up sweaty," followed quickly by my boyfriend's voice again, "Can't we close this window? I wake up feeling frozen." Towards the end of the last repetition of my boyfriend's words, there seemed to be an unevenness in the enunciation, like raising and lowering the pitch slightly.
I remained frozen in my bed, feeling my hand fall asleep in my propped-up position. I sat there for what felt like 15 or 20 minutes, listening to whatever it was shuffling around in front of our window, separated from me by some odd 10 feet and window mesh. Eventually, the shuffling became more frequent, and a weird mumbling sound came from outside the window, with no real words being said (or none that I could make out). This particular behavior didn't last long before the shuffling sound moved to the left of the window to the door, where a scratching sound began to manifest. As the sound moved, I saw the silhouette of a medium-height (5' 6") figure that moved uncannily, like when a baby animal tries to walk for the first time but isn't quite strong enough to stand up correctly. It sounded like someone was scraping some dry sticks against the wood of the door, not aggressively, but kind of like an impatient dog asking to be let in. This scratching slowly moved around the cabin, stopping when it reached the wall that I was closest to. My ears were strained to hear anything that might indicate further action, but all I could hear were footsteps on the dry leaves. The footsteps eventually moved away from the cabin and down the other side of the hill and didn't return for the rest of the night.
I stayed unmoving from my position for at least another half hour before my body re-adjusted itself slightly, letting blood flow back into my asleep limbs. I was wide awake until my boyfriend's and other roommate's alarms went off sometime before dawn to get ready for the day, which felt like maybe 2 hours but I couldn't be certain because I didn't have a clock. My boyfriend was surprised that I was awake before him, as I am typically a later sleeper, but I just told him his alarm woke me up and tried to act somewhat normally. We got up and got ready for our day, but I refused to leave the cabin until the sun began to peak over the mountains. For the rest of the week, I was on edge and felt like there were eyes on me whenever it was relatively dark out, though I am not sure how much of that was raw paranoia.
In the day following the incident at night, I realized the lines that were repeated to me by the voice were a part of a conversation that my boyfriend and I had had earlier in the week, and I came to the conclusion that whatever it was had been outside our cabin and heard us talking. This scared me a great deal, as I also realized that it had likely been lurking there in the following nights as well without us realizing it and might do so again for our remaining nights, though it ended up not coming back. I waited to tell my boyfriend about this until we had left the program because he scared easily and was already a little wary of walking in the woods at night up to the cabins. It should be noted that I know this to not be a sleep paralysis experience, as I have had them before and they were nothing like this (not to mention I was able to move).
I am asking for advice in addition to getting it off my chest, as this winter I will have to return to the same location to renew my certification and I want to know as much as I can so I can hopefully avoid another encounter. If there is an entity that exists in my area, I'd be glad to hear about it and what I can do (if anything) to avoid it."
The Appalachian mountains are 480 million years old. They were here before the Atlantic Ocean existed. And they keep generating the same shapes of fear: something at the treeline that looks almost right. A voice in the fog that calls your name. A face you trust that belongs to something you absolutely should not.
Maybe the question isn't what's out there in those woods. Maybe it's why we keep needing something to be. Why the gap between a scream and an explanation is the scariest place any of us can stand. OOOoooOOOO