Appalachian Folklore & Myths
On clear evenings along the high ridges of western North Carolina, it is easy to see why people imagine something watching from the spruce and fir. The Great Balsam Mountains sit between the tourist glow of Asheville and the deep hollers that run toward Cherokee and Sylva, a high, folded country of fog, rhododendron thickets, and black bear sign. The range is part of the Blue Ridge, with summits like Richland Balsam topping six thousand feet and catching the full brunt of Appalachian weather.
In recent years a particular bear has started to haunt this landscape in popular imagination. He is called Ole Slewfoot, a hulking, three legged bear beast said to stalk Balsam Mountain, forever just out of rifle range and hound dog reach. The story sounds ancient, as if it belonged to the first logging camps or the earliest game laws. When you begin to chase it through the sources, though, the trail looks very different.
What follows is a look at how Ole Slewfoot came to Balsam Mountain, how he is rooted in older Smokies bear lore, and why this particular cryptid is a distinctly modern creature, stitched together from bluegrass, fiction, and the internet as much as from tracks in the mud.
A three legged bear on Balsam Mountain
The most explicit written version of the Balsam Mountain Slewfoot comes from a pop science listicle published by A Z Animals in November 2023. The article surveys “Appalachian cryptids” and introduces Ole Slewfoot as entry number nine. There he is described as a bear like creature that “lives on Balsam Mountain in North Carolina,” so fast that hunters and their dogs cannot catch him. The piece recounts a tale from the 1950s. In this version, a real bear is caught in a claw trap on Balsam Mountain, chews off its own leg to escape, and triggers a massive hunt that ends with the killing of a three legged bear. Some locals declare that bear to be Ole Slewfoot. Others insist the real monster is still running the ridges.
Within a couple of years this Balsam specific framing turns up in podcast culture. The paranormal and nostalgia show That Would Be Rad promotes multiple episodes about Appalachian trail monsters with a repeating teaser line that lists Ole Slewfoot as “the three legged bear beast of Balsam Mountain,” alongside other cryptids such as the Flatwoods Monster and the Loveland Frogmen.
Between the A Z Animals article, podcast show notes, and scattered social media posts that blend Balsam Mountain with other western North Carolina legends like the Boojum, we can confidently say that by the mid twenty twenties Ole Slewfoot is circulating online as a Balsam Mountain monster. These are not nineteenth century tales. They are contemporary retellings that assume a much older tradition without actually providing one.
To find the real roots of Slewfoot, we have to step away from click driven cryptid lists and return to the bear stories of the southern mountains.
Old Reelfoot in the Smokies
In 1913, the outdoor writer and librarian Horace Kephart published Our Southern Highlanders, a foundational if deeply biased portrait of life in the Great Smoky Mountains. One chapter, “A Bear Hunt in the Smokies,” centers on a legendary animal called Old Reelfoot. Kephart’s hunting companions sit around a cabin on the North Carolina Tennessee line and tell of a great bear whose hind feet are twisted so that his tracks look odd and deceptive. Old Reelfoot outwits traps, dodges bullets, and leads the finest bear dogs in the country on exhausting chases up and down the ridges.
Linguists later picked up on Kephart’s story when tracing the Scotch Irish term “reel footed,” citing his description of the bear’s twisted tracks as a vivid example of that dialect. The tale also impressed later Smokies writers and historians. Western Carolina University’s chapter summaries of Our Southern Highlanders, for instance, single out Old Reelfoot as the legendary bear of the region, already part of a lore that was disappearing as logging and tourism transformed the high country.
Modern popular history pieces about bear hunting often treat Old Reelfoot as the patriarch of a whole family of mythic bruins. An essay on frontier grizzly and black bear stories, for example, notes “the legend of Old Slew Foot (or Old Reel Foot), which first came from the Smoky Mountains area,” and explains that the name comes from the appearance of twisted hind feet in the tracks.
Seen together, these sources give us a clear early twentieth century foundation for a twisted foot bear who resists hunters in the Smokies. This is the kind of folklore that would have traveled easily across county lines. Hunters swap stories in camps, not in neat county histories, and the Great Balsams stand only one ridge over from Kephart’s Hazel Creek country.
What “slew footed” meant in the mountains
The name Slewfoot is not unique to one bear. “Slew footed” was a common mountain expression for someone whose foot turned in, dragged, or otherwise made their walk look crooked. In a recent Appalachian music blog post about the song “Old Slew Foot,” the writer notes that they always assumed the bear’s name meant he had “one foot that was turned in or maybe one foot that dragged on the ground,” and commenters remember older relatives using “slew footed” to describe a person with a club foot.
That kind of everyday language is a reminder that Slewfoot began as a descriptive nickname rather than a fixed proper name. If an outlaw bear left strange tracks in the mud, or if a three legged bear limped along a logging road, mountain hunters were ready with the vocabulary to talk about him. Whether they called him Reelfoot, Slewfoot, or some variation likely depended on the storyteller.
Literary Slewfoot in The Yearling
One of the most influential Slewfoot stories in American culture did not come from the Smokies at all. It came from rural Florida. In 1938, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings published The Yearling, a novel about a poor white family scratching out a living in the scrub country of central Florida. The book’s most terrifying nonhuman presence is a giant black bear called Old Slewfoot. Rawlings describes him as an “outlaw bear” missing a toe, a seasoned livestock raider who can work fence lines, dodge bullets, and haunt a boy’s imagination.
For many mid twentieth century readers, Old Slewfoot in The Yearling became the definitive image of a rogue bear. Recent literary scholars still single him out as a “sinister hog eating bear” that embodies the darker side of Rawlings’s frontier Florida.
That image was strengthened by the novel’s famous illustrations. In 1939, the artist N. C. Wyeth painted a series of scenes from The Yearling for Charles Scribner’s Sons. Titles in the U. S. copyright records include “The Death of Old Slewfoot” and “The Fight with Old Slewfoot,” both registered in 1940 and renewed in 1967. The paintings, frequently reproduced in later editions and prints, fix Slewfoot visually as a massive, dark bear locked in desperate combat with hunters and dogs.
Although Rawlings set her story in Florida rather than Appalachia, she drew heavily on hunting lore that crossed regional lines. A modern article in Field & Stream notes that Rawlings wrote her famous bear hunting chapter after watching a Grantland Rice film about bear dogs and legendary bruisers, tying Old Slewfoot to a broader southern bear hunting culture that included the Smokies and the Blue Ridge as much as Florida swamps.
“High on the mountain, tell me what you see”
While Kephart and Rawlings anchored the idea of a twisted foot outlaw bear in print and painting, the name Old Slewfoot also galloped into American ears through music. By the mid twentieth century, country and bluegrass bands were performing a song commonly titled “Old Slewfoot” or “Ole Slew Foot.” The best known versions are credited to Howard Hausey and Eddie Manney, and a later blog post from Blind Pig and The Acorn confirms those names while reminiscing about Porter Wagoner and Johnny Horton recordings.
Songbooks and fakebooks aimed at bluegrass players print the lyrics with a setting in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. The opening verse begins “High on the mountain, tell me what you see,” and the chorus tells of “bear tracks” and a bear “big around the middle and broad across the rump,” portrayed as impossibly fast, raiding henhouses and smokehouses up and down the ridges.
By the 1960s, Porter Wagoner, Grandpa Jones, and other stars were performing “Ole Slewfoot” on the Porter Wagoner Show and on records. Johnny Horton recorded a rockabilly inflected version with pounding drums and harmonica that many listeners still cite as their first encounter with the song.
Music historians like Bill C. Malone place “Slewfoot” in the broader tradition of southern working class music that draws directly on local myths and hunting tales. In discussing country songs rooted in Appalachian and upland culture, Malone points to the Slewfoot song as a prime example of how a legendary bear from Smoky Mountains lore becomes a shared symbol through commercial music.
Once the song became standard bluegrass repertoire, the figure of Old Slewfoot was no longer tied only to Florida fiction or a single Smokies story. He belonged to any band that wanted a fast, crowd pleasing number about the biggest bear in the hills.
Stories, songs, and bears in living memory
The Slewfoot story did not freeze in mid century vinyl. It kept moving through oral tradition, radio, and community music. Western Carolina University’s Stories of Mountain Folk radio series, preserved in the Southern Appalachian Digital Collection, includes performances of “Old Slewfoot” by family groups who pair the song with memories of bear hunting and railroad life in the Smokies.
Appalachian bloggers and musicians have kept the tale alive as well. The Blind Pig and The Acorn blog not only shares a new performance of the song, but also collects comments from readers who remember fathers and grandfathers telling “Ole Slewfoot” stories and using the song to tease family members by inserting their names into the chorus.
Contemporary hunting podcasts continue the pattern. In one episode of MeatEater’s Bear Grease series, a guest recalls hearing about “old Slew Foot” as a mythical bear, the biggest in the mountains, a creature who never quite got killed no matter how often the story was told. Another Bear Grease episode ties the Slewfoot song to memories of tobacco country and Plott hounds, again treating the bear as a legendary presence across southern mountain culture rather than a strictly local cryptid.
Taken together, these living voices show that by the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries Slewfoot exists in at least three overlapping registers. He is a named character in a beloved novel, a staple of the bluegrass songbook, and a figure in hunters’ tall tales about that one giant bear nobody could ever quite catch.
Why Ole Slewfoot ends up on Balsam Mountain
So how do we get from Smokies bear lore, Florida fiction, and bluegrass stages to a very specific claim that Ole Slewfoot lives on Balsam Mountain in North Carolina?
First, the geography invites it. The Great Balsam Mountains are a high, cool, bear friendly subrange of the Blue Ridge. They sit between Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Pisgah and Nantahala forests, with the Blue Ridge Parkway and modern developments like Balsam Mountain Preserve bringing a steady flow of tourists, second home owners, and trail users into what was once mostly logging country.
Second, the story elements line up perfectly for a three legged bear cryptid. Old Reelfoot already established a legendary bear whose twisted tracks frustrated Smokies hunters. Kephart wrote that hunters debated whether they were chasing a dozen ordinary bears or one extraordinary animal whose strange tracks made him seem to be everywhere at once. The bluegrass song emphasizes Slewfoot’s impossible speed and appetite. Rawlings and Wyeth fix the image of Old Slewfoot as an outlaw bear who raided hog pens and had already survived more than one brush with death.
Third, real black bears in the southern Appalachians do sometimes get tangled with traps, vehicles, and other hazards, producing the occasional three legged or otherwise maimed bear that locals then recognize over and over. It does not take much imagination to see how a mid twentieth century report of a maimed bear on Balsam Mountain could get retold in the idiom of Old Slewfoot.
By the time A Z Animals compiled its list of “Appalachian cryptids” in 2023, it could draw on these overlapping traditions, fold them into a neat story about a claw trap in the 1950s and a three legged bear, and present Ole Slewfoot as a distinct Balsam Mountain monster. A podcast like That Would Be Rad, working in the same cultural stream and clearly familiar with both Appalachian lore and pop cryptid culture, could then repeat that framing and amplify it.
The result is a legend that feels old yet is clearly still under construction. The name and basic traits of Slewfoot come from early twentieth century Smokies bear lore and mid twentieth century bluegrass, while the specific Balsam Mountain setting appears only in twenty first century web and podcast sources.
Trails that still need following
From a historian’s perspective, the Balsam Mountain Slewfoot story is an open file rather than a closed case. There are several likely places where deeper, archival level research could push further back in time.
Western Carolina University’s Hunter Library already hosts Kephart’s papers and the Stories of Mountain Folk collection. Their broader Smokies and mountain heritage holdings probably include field notes, oral history transcripts, or local newsletters that mention unnamed “slew foot” or three legged bears in Haywood and Jackson counties.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park’s archives and resource management files often preserve ranger reports, hunter interviews, and wildlife incident logs. A systematic search there for three legged bears, nicknamed bruins, or unusual bear encounters on and around the Balsams might connect specific dates and names to the lore that modern writers place vaguely in “the 1950s.”
The North Carolina Folklore Journal and the archives of the North Carolina Folklore Society are also promising. Earlier volumes occasionally printed short notes on regional legends and songs. Keyword searches for Slewfoot, Reelfoot, and three legged bears could reveal pre internet attestations.
Finally, local newspapers from Sylva, Waynesville, Canton, and Asheville, whether accessed through DigitalNC or old microfilm, may hold columns or humorous features about “Old Slewfoot up on Balsam.” Even if no such article turns up, the absence would itself be telling, further supporting the idea that the Balsam specific Slewfoot is a very recent synthesis.
A modern mountain monster with old roots
When people talk about Ole Slewfoot on Balsam Mountain today, they are participating in a long tradition of mountain storytelling. Reelfoot’s twisted tracks, Slewfoot’s roaring chorus in bluegrass songs, Rawlings’s outlaw bear in Florida scrub, hunters’ campfire arguments about the biggest bear in the county, and twenty first century podcasts about Appalachian cryptids all feed into the same stream.
The Balsam Mountain Slewfoot is not a neatly documented nineteenth century legend that we can trace in courthouse records or yellowed clippings. Instead he is a living, evolving figure who reveals how stories move across regions and media. A bear who probably began as Old Reelfoot on the Smokies line and as Old Slewfoot in a Florida novel now runs in people’s imaginations along Balsam’s spruce crowned ridges, slipping between the trees just ahead of the flashlight beam.
Whether you meet him through a podcast episode, a bluegrass jam in a campground, or a suspicious set of tracks along a Balsam Mountain trail, Ole Slewfoot is a reminder that in Appalachia, the line between wildlife biology, family history, and ghost story has always been thin.
Sources and further reading
Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders (1913). Especially the chapter “A Bear Hunt in the Smokies,” which introduces the legendary bear Old Reelfoot and situates him on the North Carolina Tennessee line. A-Z Animals+1
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling (1938). The novel’s depiction of Old Slewfoot as a great outlaw bear with a missing toe shaped national images of rogue bears and rural hunting life. fadedpage.com+1
N. C. Wyeth, paintings for The Yearling (1939). Copyright records for titles such as “The Death of Old Slewfoot” and “The Fight with Old Slewfoot” show how the character moved into visual culture. Reading Rooms
“Old Slewfoot” or “Ole Slew Foot,” song credited to Howard Hausey and Eddie Manney. Widely recorded by Porter Wagoner, Johnny Horton, and others, and discussed in detail in the Blind Pig and The Acorn blog’s 2025 post “Old Slew Foot.” Blind Pig and The Acorn
Southern Appalachian Digital Collection, “Stories of Mountain Folk” radio series, Western Carolina University. Episodes featuring performances of “Old Slewfoot” alongside Smokies memories. Digital Public Library of America
Kristen Holder, “13 Appalachian Cryptids: Appearance, Behavior, and Location,” A Z Animals, 10 November 2023. Establishes the specific Balsam Mountain framing for Ole Slewfoot in online cryptid discourse. A-Z Animals
That Would Be Rad podcast, episodes and show descriptions from 2024 to 2025 that list “Ole Slewfoot, the three legged bear beast of Balsam Mountain” among Appalachian trail monsters. Apple Podcasts+1
“Grizzlies: Lords of the Frontier,” Notes from the Frontier. Surveys big bear legends and explicitly connects “Old Slew Foot (or Old Reel Foot)” to Smoky Mountains bear lore. Frontier
Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (2002). Places songs like “Slewfoot” within the broader context of southern working class culture and regional identity. SecondHandSongs