Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – The Belled Buzzard: Appalachia’s Bird of Death and Disaster
A strange sound in the sky can unsettle a whole valley. In the old stories, it was not the cry of the bird that frightened people most. It was the bell.
The belled buzzard was usually described as an ordinary buzzard, dark-winged and circling, except that somewhere around its neck hung a small bell. The bird drifted over farms, towns, courthouses, and graveyards. Sometimes it came before sickness. Sometimes it came before death. Sometimes it seemed to arrive after war, as if it had followed the scent of battle from one generation to the next.
In much of the South, and especially in the mountains and foothills where old signs were remembered, the sound of that bell became more than a curiosity. It became a warning.
The belled buzzard was one of the stranger creatures of Appalachian and Southern folklore because it stood between fact and omen. There really were buzzards with bells tied to them. Newspapers reported them. People saw them. Some boys may have caught young vultures and fastened bells to their necks as a cruel prank. But once the bird took to the sky, the story no longer belonged to the person who belled it. It belonged to everyone who heard it.
A Real Bird Behind the Story
In American mountain speech, the word buzzard usually means a vulture, especially the turkey vulture. That bird already carried a heavy burden in the imagination. It was black, silent, patient, and tied to death because it fed on carrion. It circled over hillsides, fields, roads, and river bottoms where something dead lay hidden from human sight.
The turkey vulture does not bring death. It follows it. Its place in nature is useful and necessary. It finds carcasses with a keen sense of smell, rides rising air currents, and cleans the countryside of dead animals. Yet to people watching from below, especially before modern science explained its habits, the bird could seem like a messenger from another world.
A vulture circling above a farm might mean a dead cow in a hollow. A group of vultures floating over timber might mean a deer carcass in the brush. In hard times, when fever, war, murder, and accident were familiar parts of life, it did not take much for people to read more into the sight.
Add a bell to the bird, and the old meaning deepened.
The bell made the buzzard different. It gave the bird a voice. It turned a silent scavenger into something that announced itself. A lone vulture passing overhead was ordinary. A lone vulture ringing as it passed was another matter.
Early Sightings Before the Omen Grew
Some of the earliest newspaper references to belled buzzards appeared in the 1850s. These first accounts often treated the bird as a curiosity. The question was not always what the bird meant. It was simply, who belled the buzzard?
Reports from North Carolina and nearby Southern papers show that the story was circulating well before the legend took on its full death-omen shape. A report titled “Who Belled the Buzzard” appeared in the Loudon Free Press in February 1854. In 1855, North Carolina papers carried stories of a belled buzzard near Salisbury. The Concord Weekly Gazette followed in 1856 with “The Belled Buzzard Again,” wording that suggests readers were already familiar with the strange bird’s wandering reputation.
At this stage, the belled buzzard was not always treated as supernatural. It was odd, memorable, and puzzling. Newspapers passed the story along because it was the kind of thing readers would repeat at a store counter or around a fire. A buzzard with a bell was strange enough to print, but not yet always terrible enough to dread.
That changed as the story moved through years marked by war, epidemic, and social unrest.
Brownsville and the Yellow Fever Year
The belled buzzard’s darker reputation grew stronger in 1878, during one of the most frightening epidemic years in Southern history. Yellow fever swept through parts of the lower Mississippi Valley and West Tennessee. Towns faced sickness, quarantine, flight, and death. Brownsville, Tennessee, in Haywood County, was among the places struck hard by the epidemic.
In that atmosphere, a belled buzzard was no longer just a strange bird. It could become a sign.
A December 5, 1878 report in the Pulaski Citizen is one of the key sources for the legend’s turn toward disaster. It placed the belled buzzard at Brownsville during the yellow fever crisis, when fear already hung over the community. A bird associated with carrion and death, now ringing above a town touched by disease, seemed to many like an omen made visible.
This is where the story becomes historically important. The belled buzzard did not create the fear. The fear was already there. The epidemic gave the bird a setting where its old associations could become sharper. People living through sickness often looked for signs. They watched the weather. They watched animals. They listened to rumors from neighboring towns. A bell ringing from the neck of a buzzard fit naturally into that world of dread.
From that point forward, the belled buzzard was more often described as a harbinger. It came before plague. It came before death. It came before public misfortune.
The Buzzard in Appalachian Memory
The belled buzzard was not limited to Appalachia. Reports and variants appeared across the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Ozarks. But the story fit Appalachian culture especially well because the mountains held onto signs, omens, and animal warnings as part of everyday memory.
In older Appalachian belief, certain animals could carry meaning. Owls might call before death. Dogs might sense spirits. Birds at a window might trouble a household. A buzzard was already linked with decay, and a belled buzzard made that connection impossible to ignore.
In 1975, folklorist Harry C. West published “The Belled Buzzard” in the North Carolina Folklore Journal. West described the bird as one of the most terrifying birds of ill omen in North Carolina tradition. He noted reports from Clay, Davidson, Granville, and Beaufort counties. In the stories he gathered and discussed, the belled buzzard signified death and corruption, though the bird itself did not kill. It appeared near events already shadowed by violence, guilt, or judgment.
One of the stories West included concerned Robert Henry of Clay County, near Murphy, North Carolina. Henry was said to have an uncanny ability to predict death, including his own. In the story, after his death, the family heard the tolling of a bell and saw a buzzard circling the farm. The explanation given was that Henry had seen the belled buzzard before making his predictions.
The tale is not useful as proof that a supernatural bird existed. It is useful because it shows how the old belief worked. The buzzard did not cause death. It revealed death. It was not the murderer. It was the sign that something hidden had already been set in motion.
The Courthouse Bird
Another North Carolina story connected the belled buzzard with the Granville County courthouse. Thad Stem Jr. used the tale in his 1968 book A Flagstone Walk, and West later discussed it in his folklore article.
In that version, the bird appeared when capital cases were tried at the courthouse in Oxford, North Carolina. The belled buzzard perched on the courthouse bell tower as if watching the law decide who would live and who would die. In one violent tale, a man named Wilcox was tried for murder. When the bird appeared during the trial, people in and around the courthouse panicked. After Wilcox was found guilty, confusion broke out. He escaped from the sheriff, jumped from a second-floor window, and broke his neck on the pavement.
The story continued with another death and a final strange turn involving a missing witness. Whether taken as a supernatural tale, a courthouse legend, or a moral story about guilt and public judgment, it shows the belled buzzard at its strongest. It is no longer just a bird with a bell. It is a witness. It watches courts, crowds, verdicts, and violence. It appears where human justice is uncertain and death is near.
That is one reason the legend lasted. The belled buzzard could be fitted to many kinds of fear. It could belong to a plague town, a battlefield, a murder case, a courthouse, or a lonely farm.
Second Creek, West Virginia, and the War Buzzard
By the early twentieth century, newspapers had turned the belled buzzard into something close to a wandering national legend. A July 13, 1920 article in the Atlanta Tri-Weekly Journal carried the headline “Belled Buzzard Believed Dead.” It claimed that the famous belled buzzard of South Georgia was more than 100 years old and wore a small sleigh bell said to have been placed there during the War of 1812.
The article then carried the story into Appalachia. It reported that the bird had recently been seen on the farm of W. H. Leach at Second Creek, West Virginia, where it looked weak and emaciated. The newspaper repeated the legend that the buzzard had followed war’s carnage and had been present at every major battle north of the equator.
That claim should not be read as fact. It belongs to legend. No single buzzard from the War of 1812 was still traveling the skies of West Virginia in 1920. But the exaggeration is exactly what makes the source valuable. By then, the belled buzzard had become a mythic bird. Newspapers did not merely report a sighting. They gave the bird a biography.
The same kind of story appeared in other Southern papers that year. The old buzzard was said to have seen wars, borders, battles, and faraway countries. The bird had become a carrier of memory. It was a scavenger of history itself.
Disaster Feared in Marlinton
Two years later, the belled buzzard appeared again in a strongly Appalachian setting. A July 8, 1922 report in the Fairmont West Virginian used the headline “Disaster Feared With Coming of Belled Buzzard.” The report concerned a sighting in the Marlinton area of Pocahontas County, West Virginia.
The headline alone shows how far the legend had traveled from the simpler newspaper curiosities of the 1850s. By 1922, a belled buzzard did not merely make people wonder who had tied a bell to a bird. It made them fear that something bad was coming.
Marlinton sits in the Allegheny Mountains, in a region where isolation, timber work, rail lines, floods, fires, and hard travel made disaster part of living memory. A bell heard in the sky above such a place would have carried more than sound. It would have carried every story people had already heard about the bird.
That is how folklore works. One sighting gathers older meanings around it. People do not meet the bird alone. They meet the bird and every story that came before.
Why the Story Lasted
The belled buzzard lasted because it joined the ordinary and the uncanny in a way people could believe. A buzzard could be caught. A bell could be tied around its neck. The bird could fly for miles. A farmer in one county might hear it in the morning, and someone in another county might hear it days later.
Nothing about that required magic.
Yet the effect was eerie. Imagine a quiet valley at dusk. The cattle are settling. The road is empty. A dark bird circles above the ridge, and from somewhere overhead comes a thin, uneven ringing. It is not a church bell. It is not a cowbell from the pasture. It moves through the air.
People remembered sounds like that.
Once remembered, the sound could be connected to whatever came next. If a neighbor died the following week, the story grew. If fever reached the town, the bird had warned of it. If a trial ended badly, the bird had watched it happen. If a flood, mine accident, murder, or fire followed, the bell was no longer just a bell. It became prophecy.
The belled buzzard also carried older religious and moral associations. Bells marked funerals. Bells called people to church. Bells warned of fire. Bells tolled for the dead. A buzzard already belonged to the world of carrion and endings. Put a bell on it, and it sounded like a funeral crossing the sky.
The Cruelty Behind the Wonder
There is another side of the story that should not be missed. If many of these birds were real, then someone had tied bells to living vultures. Some accounts mention sleigh bells, brass bells, leather straps, rawhide, or cords. What sounded like mystery to people below may have been misery for the bird.
The 1920 Atlanta Tri-Weekly Journal report described the supposed old buzzard as having its beak caught behind the leather strap that held the bell. The bird was said to be unable to free itself, and those nearby could not get close enough to help it. That detail cuts through the legend. Behind the omen was an animal.
Folklore often begins with something real and then moves beyond it. The real bird may have suffered. The story that followed gave that suffering a supernatural shape. The bell that frightened people may have been tied there by human hands.
That does not weaken the folklore. It makes it more human. The belled buzzard is a story about fear, but also about cruelty, guilt, memory, and the way people explain what they cannot control.
From Buzzard to Omen Creature
The belled buzzard belongs beside other Appalachian omen creatures, not because it was the same as them, but because it helped prepare the ground for later stories. Appalachia has long remembered beings that seem to arrive before trouble. Some are birds. Some are white animals. Some are ghostly riders or strange lights. In West Virginia, the later Mothman legend would also be tied in public memory to disaster, warning, and a winged figure seen before tragedy.
The belled buzzard was earlier and simpler. It did not need glowing eyes or a monstrous shape. It needed only a common bird and an uncommon sound.
That may be why it worked so well. A monster can be dismissed by those who did not see it. But many people had seen buzzards. Many had heard bells. The belled buzzard asked them to believe only one strange addition.
And once believed, it could fly anywhere.
What the Bell Meant
The belled buzzard was never just one thing. In early newspapers, it was a curiosity. In epidemic reports, it became a plague omen. In courthouse tales, it became a witness to death and judgment. In West Virginia stories, it became a warning of disaster. In later newspaper exaggerations, it became an ancient bird of war, too old and too strange to die.
Historically, there were likely many belled buzzards rather than one immortal bird. Different bells, different straps, and different locations suggest that more than one vulture was caught and marked. But folklore does not require a single animal. It requires a pattern people recognize.
The pattern was this. A dark bird appeared. A bell rang. Then people waited for what would follow.
In Appalachia, where valleys carry sound and old stories carry farther, the belled buzzard became one of the region’s most haunting signs. It was not the cause of death. It was the sound people heard when death already seemed near.
The bell was the warning.
The buzzard was the shadow.
And the story was what remained after both had passed over the mountain.
Sources & Further Reading
Loudon Free Press. “Who Belled the Buzzard.” February 21, 1854. https://www.newspapers.com/image/61369261/?match=1&clipping_id=161427654
Republican Banner. “A Belled Buzzard.” Salisbury, NC. November 27, 1855. https://www.newspapers.com/image/67760128/?match=1&clipping_id=161427826
Concord Weekly Gazette. “The Belled Buzzard Again.” March 29, 1856. https://www.newspapers.com/image/78372294/?match=1&clipping_id=161428006
Alexandria Gazette. Untitled item from the Winchester Virginian. August 1, 1856. https://www.newspapers.com/image/67992752/
Spirit of Jefferson. “Who Belled the Buzzard!” March 5, 1872. https://www.newspapers.com/image/111394984/
Daily Gazette. “A Bell Buzzard.” February 13, 1875. https://www.newspapers.com/image/333603378/
Orangeburg News and Times. Item on the belled buzzard. February 10, 1877. https://www.newspapers.com/image/342224233/
Public Ledger. “An Ominous Incident.” Memphis, TN. November 16, 1878. https://www.newspapers.com/image/586369583/
Knoxville Daily Chronicle. “That Belled Buzzard.” Knoxville, TN. November 22, 1878. https://www.newspapers.com/image/584836236/
Pulaski Citizen. “The Belled Buzzard.” Pulaski, TN. December 5, 1878. https://www.newspapers.com/image/171589692/?match=1&clipping_id=161429436
Cincinnati Daily Star. Lynchburg News item on the belled buzzard. December 4, 1878. https://www.newspapers.com/image/712093648/
Fresno Weekly Expositor. “A Belled Buzzard.” September 23, 1891. https://www.newspapers.com/image/607521934/
Atlanta Tri-Weekly Journal. “Belled Buzzard Believed Dead.” Atlanta, GA. July 13, 1920. https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn89053713/1920-07-13/ed-1/seq-6/
The Bartow Tribune and The Cartersville News. “Aged Buzzard Thought Dead; Bird Marked in War of 1812, Present at Every Big Engagement Since Then.” November 18, 1920. https://www.newspapers.com/image/71193361/
Fairmont West Virginian. “Disaster Feared With Coming of Belled Buzzard.” Fairmont, WV. July 8, 1922. https://www.newspapers.com/image/378484088/?match=1&clipping_id=161430509
West, Harry C. “The Belled Buzzard.” North Carolina Folklore Journal 23, no. 4, November 1975, 118-120. https://archive.org/stream/northcarolinafol2324nort/northcarolinafol2324nort_djvu.txt
Stem, Thad Jr. “The Belled Buzzard of Granville County.” In A Flagstone Walk. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. https://archive.org/details/flagstonewalk0000stem
Carden, Gary, and Nina Anderson. Belled Buzzards, Hucksters & Grieving Spectres: Strange & True Tales of the Appalachian Mountains. Asheville, NC: Down Home Press, 1994. https://www.abebooks.com/9781878086280/Belled-Buzzards-Hucksters-Grieving-Spectres-1878086286/plp
Carden, Gary. “Appalachian Bestiary: Wondrous and Fearsome Creatures of the Southern Wild.” North Carolina Folklore Journal 59, no. 2, Fall-Winter 2012, 60-92. https://paws.wcu.edu/ncfj/NCFJ592.pdf
Green, Paul. Paul Green’s Wordbook: An Alphabet of Reminiscence. Edited by Rhoda H. Wynn. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. https://archive.org/stream/PaulGreensWordbookAnAlphabetOfReminiscence/Paul%20Green%27s%20Wordbook%20An%20Alphabet%20of%20Reminiscence_djvu.txt
Rayburn, O. E. “Some Fabulous Monsters and Other Folk Beliefs from the Ozarks.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 19, no. 3, Autumn 1960, 215-228. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40038001
Randolph, Vance. We Always Lie to Strangers: Tall Tales from the Ozarks. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951. https://archive.org/details/wealwayslietostr0000rand
Skinner, Charles Montgomery. “The Belled Buzzard.” In American Myths and Legends, Volume 1. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1903. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/American_Myths_and_Legends/Volume_1/The_Belled_Buzzard
Cobb, Irvin S. “The Belled Buzzard.” Saturday Evening Post, September 28, 1912. https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1912-09-28_185_14
Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Turkey Vulture.” All About Birds. Accessed June 10, 2026. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Turkey_Vulture/overview
Heilman, J. “A Historical and Comparative Examination of the Mothman.” Capstone, University of North Carolina Press Janeway, 2025. https://janeway.uncpress.org/capstone/article/2453/galley/2954/download/
Author Note: This article follows the belled buzzard through old newspapers, folklore journals, and mountain memory, where a real bird became a warning sign. As with many Appalachian legends, the story matters not because every claim was literal, but because people believed the sound of that bell meant something.