Appalachian Folklore & Myths
Giant birds haunt Appalachian stories. In northern Pennsylvania people talk about thunderbirds with twenty foot wingspans darkening the sky above ridgelines. In the southern mountains another bird already lived in the stories long before the word thunderbird ever reached the region. For the Cherokee along the Little Tennessee River in what is now eastern Tennessee, one of the most feared and revered beings in the upper world was the Tlanuwa, a great mythic hawk that nested in a cliff cave so steep that no human could reach it.
In the late nineteenth century ethnographer James Mooney traveled among the Eastern Band of Cherokee and heard old people tell the Tlanuwa stories in their own language. He wrote them down, alongside dozens of sacred formulas and origin tales, in the Bureau of American Ethnology reports that many of us still read today.
This article follows those accounts along the Little Tennessee, out across the wider landscape of Cherokee sacred places and Mississippian rock art, then north into Pennsylvania thunderbird lore. Along the way it tries to keep one distinction clear. For Cherokee and other Native nations of the eastern woodlands, beings like Tlanuwa and the Thunderers are part of living religious traditions. Modern monster hunting around “thunderbirds” is a different thing entirely, even when it borrows old words and old landscapes.
The Nest of the Tlanuwa at Citico
Mooney titled one of his most striking Cherokee narratives “The Nest of the Tlanuwa.” He placed it on the north bank of the Little Tennessee River, in a bend just below the mouth of Citico Creek in Blount County, Tennessee. About halfway up a high cliff that hangs over the water, he noted, there is a cave with two openings. The rock projects outward so that the mouth cannot be seen from above. There are white streaks on the cliff from the cave down to the river, said to be the droppings of the great birds that once nested there. The Cherokee name for the place, Tlanuwa’i, simply means “Tlanuwa place.”
In Mooney’s version, a pair of Tlanuwa soar up and down the river hunting. When they begin carrying off people’s children, the village turns to a medicine man, who arranges an ambush from a canoe beneath the cliff. Warriors float past with a large basket shield. When one of the birds dives, they shoot it through the body with arrows and knock it into the river. The other Tlanuwa circles higher and higher until it vanishes in the sky.
Another story, preserved in modern retellings from Arkansas and from Cherokee community sources, tells how Tlanuwa battles Uktena, the horned serpent that lives in deep water. There too the birds nest high on a cliff above a river. Tlanuwa belongs to the Above World, Uktena to the watery Below World. Their conflict plays out over the Middle World where people live.
The Tennessee State Library and Archives now summarizes the same legend in its exhibit on Native American myths. It describes “a pair of immense raptors” living in a cave in the Citico cliff and notes that the site lies just below Citico Creek on the north bank of the Little Tennessee. Mooney’s text, the Cherokee place name, and modern archival work all agree on the basics. For the people who lived there, Tlanuwa was not a vague symbol. It was a specific being tied to a specific rock, cave, and bend in the river.
Thunderers and the Cherokee Upper World
Cherokee religious life does not revolve only around a single giant raptor. In the same years that he wrote down Tlanuwa stories, Mooney translated dozens of medicine texts kept by Eastern Band practitioners like Swimmer, Gatigwanasti, and Gahuni. Those sacred formulas, originally written in Sequoyah’s syllabary, invoke a whole hierarchy of spirits connected with disease, healing, weather, and the sacred fire.
Among the most important of these are the Thunderers, or Ani Hyuntikwalaski, a race of powerful storm beings who live in the sky. In Mooney’s prose and in later Cherokee collections, the Thunderers appear as birdlike spirits who bring thunder and lightning, protect the people from serpents and monsters, and respond when called upon in the right ways.
Mooney also recorded the story “The Moon and the Thunders,” in which the Sun and Moon travel with the Thunderers and help shape the rhythm of night and day. Modern online presentations of the tale usually draw directly from his 1900 text. In that narrative the Thunderers are not vague weather spirits. They are persons who talk, act, and make mistakes, just like humans and animals do in other Cherokee myths.
Twentieth century Cherokee storytellers have continued to tell related stories in the same landscape of rivers, cliffs, mountains, and ballplay grounds that Mooney described. Collections like Friends of Thunder, which gathers Oklahoma Cherokee oral traditions recorded in the twentieth century, include variants of Thunderer tales and show how these beings remained active in Western Cherokee communities long after removal.
When you place Tlanuwa and the Thunderers side by side, a pattern emerges. Giant raptors and storm beings belong to the same Upper World and often oppose the same Below World forces such as Uktena. Archaeologists and folklorists today sometimes compare these Cherokee stories to thunderbird motifs elsewhere in North America, but Cherokee people had their own names, relationships, and responsibilities long before that generic English term came into fashion.
Cliffs, Caves, and Sacred Geography in the Southern Appalachians
Citico’s Tlanuwa cliff is not an isolated marvel. It belongs to a network of Cherokee sacred places that clustered along the Little Tennessee and other rivers in the Appalachian Summit. Mooney and later writers listed nearby myth sites such as the Haunted Whirlpool, the Spear Finger’s haunt across the river, and other locations where stories, ritual practice, and geography all overlapped.
Archaeologist Christopher Rodning has argued that Cherokee towns and farmsteads were anchored by “center places” that tied houses, council houses, and fields to older sacred features in the landscape. His work on the southern Appalachians points out that Mooney’s myth locations line up with archaeological sites along the Little Tennessee and its tributaries, including Citico itself.
Cherokee use of caves adds another layer. A study of syllabary inscriptions in so called dark zone caves in the southern Appalachians shows how people carried writing, prayer, and ritual deep underground. That work quotes Mooney’s description of Tlanuwa’i, “the place of the Tlanuwa or great mythical hawk,” as part of a broader Cherokee cave cosmology. Caves could lead down into the Below World, while high cliffs like Citico’s carried stories of beings from the sky.
Modern photographs of Citico Creek and the surrounding Cherokee National Forest show a quiet mountain stream lined with hardwoods and rhododendron. None of those pictures reveal the older Cherokee names or the stories attached to the cliffs and bends. Yet in the accounts preserved by Mooney and by Cherokee elders, those waters sit in a thick weave of myth and memory that stretches from the underworld to the storm clouds.
Birds Carved in Shell and Painted in Caves
Long before Mooney’s fieldwork, artists in the Mississippian world were carving and painting powerful bird figures across the Southeast. Archaeologists call this artistic and religious style the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. It includes shell gorgets, copper plates, engraved stone, and cave paintings that show raptors, bird men with human bodies and avian heads, and other beings from the Upper World.
Rodning’s study of engraved shell gorgets from southwestern North Carolina lists several major gorget types and shows how they cluster around Pisgah and Qualla phase sites in the Appalachian Summit. Some depict coiled rattlesnakes and Underworld beings. Others bear masks and birdlike imagery that scholars link to Above World powers and chiefly status.
In Kentucky, researchers like Fred Coy, Thomas Fuller, Larry Meadows, and James Swauger have cataloged rock art sites that range from simple pecked symbols to full figures on bluff faces and in shelters. Their volume Rock Art of Kentucky describes bird tracks, birds, and abstract designs among the most common motifs.
Prehistoric Kentucky Cave Art, a report prepared for the Kentucky Heritage Council, documents mud glyphs and pictographs in central and eastern Kentucky caves. Some of these images show creatures with outstretched wings, while others use geometric forms associated with Upper World symbolism elsewhere in the Mississippian sphere.
Anthropologist David Dye’s review of Mississippian religious beliefs pulls together mound architecture, rock art, and portable objects into a three tiered cosmos of Above World, Middle World, and Below World. He notes that bird and bird man imagery often marks warriors and ritual leaders connected to thunder, warfare, and sky powers. Sierra Bow’s technical work on Mississippian paint recipes in Tennessee cave art adds microscopic detail to the same picture by showing how carefully artisans selected pigments for figures that seem to belong to rituals involving spirits of the sky and underworld.
None of these artifacts can be labeled “Tlanuwa” or “thunderbird” in a simple way. The engravers and painters did not leave captions. Yet when you set the Mississippian birds beside Tlanuwa on its cliff or the Thunderers rumbling across the clouds, it is hard to ignore the shared concern with raptorial beings who move between worlds and enforce the boundaries between humans and monsters.
Thunderbirds in the Northern Appalachians
Further north, along the ridges of New York and Pennsylvania, rock art and colonial era documents record another set of sky beings that English speakers came to call thunderbirds. Archaeologist Edward Lenik surveyed this material in a detailed article on the thunderbird motif in Northeastern Indian art. He found bird figures with spread wings carved on rocks, painted in caves, and inscribed on portable objects from New England through upstate New York and into the upper Susquehanna.
A striking eighteenth century example comes from Martha’s Vineyard, where a Wampanoag person drew a thunderbird as a signature on an English legal document. That tiny sketch, analyzed by Jill Bouck and James Richardson, shows how thunderbird imagery could persist in Native political life even as colonial authorities tried to fold Native communities into their own paperwork.
Folklorist George Lankford’s Native American Legends of the Southeast collects myths from Natchez, Caddo, Biloxi, Chickasaw, and other nations whose homelands border the southern Appalachians. Many of his “Above World” stories feature powerful birds and Thunder beings who fight horned serpents, enforce taboos, and guide human heroes.
From Lenik’s New England thunderbirds to Lankford’s southeastern tales, a broad pattern emerges around the Appalachian arc. Native peoples imagined giant bird spirits as guardians, enforcers, and sometimes dangerous neighbors whose power had to be approached with care. Tlanuwa and the Cherokee Thunderers fit into that wider world, but they also remain distinctly Cherokee, rooted in the language and rivers of the southern mountains.
From Sacred Beings to Monster Headlines
Modern “thunderbird” stories in Pennsylvania and the northern Appalachians grow out of a very different context. Starting in the mid twentieth century, local historian Robert R. Lyman Sr. collected accounts of giant birds in a series of self published books under the title Amazing Indeed: Strange Events in the Black Forest. Writing about the rugged country of northcentral Pennsylvania, he repeated stories of hunters and motorists who claimed to see enormous, dark birds soaring over the so called Black Forest region.
Journalist Curt Sutherly brought some of those tales to a wider audience in his 1975 newspaper feature “Thunderbird: Myth or Fact?” in The Daily News of Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Later bloggers and researchers have pointed out that Sutherly relied heavily on Lyman’s material and that many of the best known Black Forest thunderbird stories can be traced back to those mid century publications rather than to earlier Native traditions.
Today, regional writers like the Pennsylvania Rambler still walk the back roads of Potter and Clinton counties, revisiting old reports and adding new ones from people who say they have seen huge birds along Route 44 and other isolated highways. These articles often describe birds that look like oversized vultures or eagles with wingspans between twelve and twenty feet, swooping low over cars or ridge tops.
The national media has taken notice as well. In October 2024 CBS Pittsburgh aired a segment that revisited mysterious thunderbird sightings in western Pennsylvania and tied them to a television series about unexplained creatures. Tourism promoters in the Laurel Highlands now talk about Derry, Pennsylvania, as a gateway to the “mysterious Chestnut Ridge,” complete with thunderbird lore.
These modern accounts are fascinating as folklore and popular culture. They show how rural communities use giant bird stories to talk about wildness, regional identity, and the thin line between wilderness and modern life. Yet they operate in a different register from Cherokee Tlanuwa narratives or Wampanoag thunderbird signatures. Lyman, Sutherly, and later enthusiasts usually treat thunderbirds as cryptids, unknown animals waiting to be discovered. The older Indigenous sources treat them as persons in a sacred cosmos rather than as biological specimens.
Why the Distinction Matters
In a 2020 article for Audubon magazine, science writer Bridget Alex interviewed archaeologist David Dye and other Native and non Native scholars about thunderbirds and related beings. They stressed that in many communities thunderbird knowledge is sensitive. Some stories are only told at certain times of year or in certain settings. Others are not meant for outsiders at all.
Dye’s own work on Mississippian religion emphasizes that images of birds, bird men, and Thunder beings are not simple illustrations. They are part of ritual systems that connected people to ancestors, animals, and cosmic forces. Treating them as mere “monsters” or cryptids strips away that context and flattens very different traditions into a single sensational label.
For an Appalachian historian or local storyteller, this means a few things.
It is fair to write about Tlanuwa, thunderbirds, and other giant birds as part of the region’s long story, but it is important to keep Cherokee and other Native voices at the center when dealing with Indigenous sacred beings. Mooney’s texts, for all their detail, remain the work of an outsider in the 1890s. Modern Cherokee scholars, elders, and storytellers continue to interpret Tlanuwa and the Thunderers within their own communities today.
It also means that when we enjoy a roadside tale about a Black Forest thunderbird or a Chestnut Ridge monster, we should recognize that we have stepped into a more recent strand of folklore rooted in newspapers, paperbacks, and cable television. That does not make those stories less interesting, but it does make them different from the Tlanuwa cliff that watched over Cherokee villages along the Little Tennessee centuries before Lyman ever set pen to paper.
Walking the Rivers With Old Stories in Mind
If you stand along the Little Tennessee near the old Citico site today, the white streaked cliff that Mooney described still rises above the water. Anglers cast for trout in Citico Creek, hikers follow Forest Service trails, and paddlers drift through eddies with no idea that a great mythic hawk once flashed across this stretch of river in Cherokee narrative. Fish and wildlife agencies talk about restoration, while historians and preservationists debate how to remember submerged towns and fields.
Carrying Tlanuwa and the Thunderers into that landscape does not mean pretending that giant birds are still circling literally overhead. It means remembering that for the Cherokee this was a living sacred geography in which cliffs, caves, and whirlpools were active players. It means noticing how Mississippian artists carved and painted powerful birds into shell and stone, how Wampanoag signers tucked a thunderbird into an English manuscript, and how Pennsylvanians in the twentieth century reworked the sky being into a roadside cryptid.
Seen from that perspective, Appalachian thunderbird lore is not a single story but a layered palimpsest. At its base lie Indigenous cosmologies like Tlanuwa’s cliff and the Thunderers’ storms. On top of that lie centuries of colonial encounters, archaeological discoveries, and ethnographic texts. Above that again lie local histories, pulp paperbacks, and video features that chase giant birds across the ridgelines.
For those of us who tell Appalachian stories today, the challenge is to honor the deepest layer first, to listen carefully to the Cherokee and other Native nations whose homelands these mountains still are, and to let the later thunderbird tales rest on that older foundation without burying it.
Sources & Further Reading
James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, in the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897 to 1898, published 1900. Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive editions consulted. Project Gutenberg+1
James Mooney, The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1891, including formula manuscripts from Swimmer, Gatigwanasti, Gahuni, and others. Project Gutenberg+1
Tennessee State Library and Archives, “Native Americans: Tennessee Myths and Legends,” online exhibit section on Tlanuwa at Citico. Share Tn Gov+1
“How Tlanuwa Defeated Uktena (Cherokee),” Indians of Arkansas educational site, University of Arkansas. archeology.uark.edu+1
Christopher B. Rodning, “Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric Shell Gorgets from Southwestern North Carolina,” Southeastern Archaeology 31, no. 1 (2012). Taylor & Francis Online+2Academia+2
Fred E. Coy Jr., Thomas C. Fuller, Larry G. Meadows, and James L. Swauger, Rock Art of Kentucky, University Press of Kentucky, 1997, and Kentucky Heritage Council, Prehistoric Kentucky Cave Art (report). Amazon+2The University Press of Kentucky+2
David H. Dye, “Mississippian Religious Beliefs and Ritual Practice: Earthen Monuments, Rock Art, and Sacred Shrines,” Reviews in Anthropology 48 (2020). ResearchGate+3Taylor & Francis Online+3digitalcommons.memphis.edu+3
Edward J. Lenik, “The Thunderbird Motif in Northeastern Indian Art,” Archaeology of Eastern North America 40 (2012). JSTOR+2JSTOR+2
George E. Lankford, Native American Legends of the Southeast: Tales from the Natchez, Caddo, Biloxi, Chickasaw, and Other Nations, University of Alabama Press. Wikipedia+3University of Alabama Press+3Amazon+3
Jack F. Kilpatrick and Anna G. Kilpatrick, Friends of Thunder: Folktales of the Oklahoma Cherokees, University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Amazon+2University of Oklahoma Press+2
Norman Houser, “The Black Forest Thunderbird” series on The Pennsylvania Rambler blog, with discussion of Robert R. Lyman Sr.’s Amazing Indeed volumes and Curt Sutherly’s “Thunderbird: Myth or Fact?” The Daily News (Lebanon, Pennsylvania), 17 February 1975. thepennsylvaniarambler.wordpress.com+3thepennsylvaniarambler.wordpress.com+3thepennsylvaniarambler.wordpress.com+3
CBS Pittsburgh, “Mysterious Thunderbird Sightings in Pennsylvania Examined in TV Series,” October 24, 2024, and related promotional coverage for the thunderbird episode of Lost Monster Files. CBS News+2CBS News+2
Bridget Alex, “Rulers of the Upper Realm, Thunderbirds Are Powerful Native Spirits,” Audubon Magazine, November 30, 2020. History Defined -+3Audubon+3Audubon+3