Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – Raw Head and Bloody Bones: The Window-Scratching Boogeyman of Appalachian Childhood
There are some childhood fears that do not need a full story. They only need a sound.
For Dolly Parton and her brothers and sisters in the mountains of Sevier County, Tennessee, that sound could be a scratch on the window screen. Her mother, Avie Lee Parton, used stories of ol’ Scratch Eyes, Raw Head Bloody Bones, and the Boogerman to get a crowded house of children into bed and keep them there. If the children were slow to settle down, their mother only had to go outside and scrape the screen. The children dove under the covers.
That memory gives Raw Head and Bloody Bones one of its clearest Appalachian scenes. It is not a castle story or a faraway ghost tale. It is a mother outside a mountain cabin, a dark window, a room full of children, and the sudden certainty that something awful is just beyond the screen.
Raw Head and Bloody Bones belongs to a large family of boogeyman figures used to frighten children into obedience. In Appalachia and the wider South, the name could mean a creature outside the house, a thing under the bed, a warning in the woods, a presence near a thicket, or a full folktale told by the fire. Sometimes it was Raw Head and Bloody Bones. Sometimes Rawhead. Sometimes Bloody Bones. Sometimes the name was paired with Scratch Eyes, Boogerman, haints, witches, or whatever local fear suited the moment.
The name was old long before it reached the mountains. But in Appalachia, it found a natural home in oral storytelling, child discipline, and the uneasy border between play and terror.
An Old Name Before Appalachia
Raw Head and Bloody Bones did not begin in Appalachia. The name appears in English sources centuries before the Appalachian frontier existed.
One of the earliest known printed references comes from the mid sixteenth century, when “Rawhed” and “Bloody Bone” appeared in an English religious polemic. By 1566, John Rastell could refer to “Bloudy bone” and “Raw head” as part of a grandmother’s frightening tale, which suggests that the name was already familiar enough to work as a cultural reference.
By 1693, John Locke used the figure in Some Thoughts Concerning Education as an example of the way adults frightened children into submission. Locke criticized servants and caretakers who awed children with “raw-head and bloody-bones” and similar names. That passage is important because it shows the figure’s social purpose. Raw Head and Bloody Bones was not only a monster. It was a tool. Adults invoked it to control children.
Samuel Johnson’s eighteenth century dictionary also preserved the meaning. Johnson defined Rawhead as a specter used to frighten children. Later British folklore references described Rawhead, Tommy Rawhead, Bloody-bones, and Rawhead-and-Bloody-bones as bogey figures attached to dark cupboards, stairways, water holes, pits, and other dangerous places.
In rural England, such warnings made practical sense. A marl pit, abandoned shaft, deep pond, or dark cellar could kill a child. Telling a child that a monster lived there may have been harsh, but it was memorable. A plain warning might be forgotten. A name like Raw Head and Bloody Bones stayed in the mind.
When English, Scots-Irish, African American, and other oral traditions moved through the South and into the Appalachian mountains, old fright names came with them. They changed as they traveled. In one family, Raw Head was a warning. In another, it was a full tale. In another, it was only a phrase, said once at bedtime, enough to make a child pull the covers over his head.
The Kentucky Mountain Tale Tradition
The strongest Appalachian scholarly evidence for Raw Head and Bloody Bones comes from the Kentucky mountain tale tradition.
In 1955, folklorist Leonard Roberts published South from Hell-fer-Sartin: Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales, one of the major collections of eastern Kentucky storytelling. Roberts collected heavily on the north side of Pine Mountain, especially in Leslie and Perry counties. His work preserved a world in which children, parents, grandparents, school communities, and neighbors still carried long folktales in memory.
Among the most important young tellers in that tradition was Jane Muncy, later Jane Muncy Fugate. Roberts recorded her as a child, and later scholars returned to her family’s story tradition. In 2001, the Journal of Folklore Research published “Two Versions of ‘Rawhead and Bloodybones’ from the Farmer-Muncy Family,” narrated by Glen Muncy Anderson and Jane Muncy Fugate, with an introduction by Carl Lindahl.
That article is crucial because it shows Raw Head and Bloody Bones as more than a bedtime threat. In the Farmer-Muncy family tradition, it could appear as a developed wonder tale, connected to older international tale types. Scholars have compared some Appalachian Raw Head and Bloody Bones versions to “The Kind and Unkind Girls,” a tale pattern found widely in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In these stories, a girl may be tested by strange figures, rewarded for kindness, and contrasted with another girl who fails the test.
This is very different from the simple warning, “Raw Head and Bloody Bones will get you.” That difference matters. Folklorists have long noticed that Raw Head and Bloody Bones is slippery. Sometimes collectors searched for a complete story and found only a frightening name. Sometimes they found a monster. Sometimes they found a fairy tale with an old terror attached to it. Sometimes they found only a family memory of being scared half to death.
In eastern Kentucky, all of those forms could exist beside each other.
Dolly Parton’s Raw Head Bloody Bones
Dolly Parton’s memory may be the most vivid modern Appalachian account of the figure as a childhood fright.
Her mother did not need to tell a polished folktale every night. The children already knew enough. Raw Head Bloody Bones was waiting outside. Scratch Eyes might be near. The Boogerman could come if the children did not settle down. The house was full of noise, cold, and children sleeping close together. The story did what it was supposed to do.
Dolly later turned that memory into a spoken performance, “Bloody Bones, Scratch Eyes & The Boogie Man,” recorded live in Sevierville. The performance is funny because she is grown and can laugh at it. But the humor rests on real childhood fear. The children heard barking dogs, coughs, scratches, and night sounds, then filled the dark with monsters.
That is how many Appalachian boogeymen worked. They were not always described in detail. The adult gave the name. The child supplied the picture.
Raw Head and Bloody Bones was especially effective because the name itself is nearly a picture. “Raw Head” suggests exposed flesh, injury, a skull without skin, or something half animal and half corpse. “Bloody Bones” suggests remains, death, and the awful thing left after violence. A child did not need a full explanation.
The name already sounded like something that should never come through the door.
Raw Head in African American and Southern Tradition
Raw Head and Bloody Bones also appears in African American folklore and Southern oral tradition.
Thomas W. Talley’s Negro Folk Rhymes, published in 1922, includes a short “Raw Head and Bloody Bones” rhyme. Talley noted that it was repeated to restless children at night to make them lie still and go to sleep. The rhyme’s purpose is clear. It belongs to the same world as hush songs, bedtime threats, and child quieting formulas.
The WPA slave narratives also preserve memories of Raw Head and Bloody Bones in the South. In the Georgia interviews, Rachel Adams remembered children being afraid to play in a thicket near the house because Raw Head and Bloody Bones lived there. Georgia Baker recalled being frightened badly by tales of Raw Head and Bloody Bones and haints. Mary Colbert gave a different kind of testimony, saying her enslavers did not allow such frightening tales to be told to children.
These accounts must be handled carefully. WPA narratives are invaluable but complicated sources, shaped by memory, age, interviewer, race, and the conditions under which formerly enslaved people spoke in the 1930s. Still, they show that Raw Head and Bloody Bones was known beyond white Appalachian storytelling. It belonged to a broader Southern world where Black and white children heard warnings about haints, woods, darkness, forbidden places, and creatures that punished disobedience.
That broader Southern context helps explain why the figure shows up in so many forms. It moved through households, plantations, cabins, schools, churches, and storytelling circles. It could be attached to a thicket in Georgia, a window in Tennessee, a Kentucky mountain tale, a Virginia story, or a North Carolina warning.
A Creature, A Name, Or A Warning
Folklorists have debated what Raw Head and Bloody Bones really is. That question may be part of the point.
Archer Taylor, Herbert Halpert, and Donald D. Simmons all treated the figure as a folklore problem in the 1950s. They recognized that the name was widespread, old, and memorable, but not always attached to one stable plot. A collector might ask for the story of Raw Head and Bloody Bones and receive only a child-discipline formula. Another collector might find a full tale. A third might find a rhyme, a nightmare, or a local warning attached to a dangerous place.
That makes Raw Head and Bloody Bones different from a single ghost story tied to one house or cemetery. It is closer to a fright-name that can gather stories around itself.
In one place, Raw Head lives in the woods. In another, he waits outside the window. In another, Bloody Bones lurks under the stairs. In British sources, the figure can be connected to water pits and dangerous holes. In Appalachian and Southern memory, the figure often stands near the edge of childhood safety, just beyond the door, just beyond the firelight, just beyond the yard.
The figure’s power comes from uncertainty. The child is not told exactly what Raw Head and Bloody Bones looks like, where it came from, or what rules bind it. The child only knows that it is near, and that it gets children who do not do what they are told.
The Window, The Bed, And The Dark
The Appalachian version of Raw Head and Bloody Bones often works best indoors.
A child is in bed. The house is dark. Adults have finished the day’s work and want quiet. Outside are woods, dogs, weather, and unlit space. Inside are quilts, siblings, and the warmth of the room. The border between those worlds is the door or window.
That is why Dolly Parton’s window-screen memory is so powerful. The sound turns a story into a physical event. The children are no longer only imagining Raw Head Bloody Bones. They hear him.
In mountain households without modern insulation, streetlights, or constant electronic noise, the night was louder and darker than many people know today. A possum under the porch, a limb against the wall, a dog barking down the hollow, or a parent scratching the screen could become proof that the old story was true.
Raw Head and Bloody Bones belonged to that soundscape. The figure did not need to be seen. In many ways, seeing him would have weakened him. The scratch was enough.
Why Parents Used Such Tales
Modern readers may be uneasy with the idea of parents terrifying children into obedience. Many were. John Locke objected to the practice in the seventeenth century, and Mary Colbert’s WPA interview remembered a household where such tales were not allowed around children.
Yet the practice survived because it worked.
In rural mountain communities, children faced real dangers. Woods could hide cliffs, snakes, wells, creeks, strangers, and abandoned industrial places. A child wandering after dark could get lost or hurt. A child refusing to sleep could keep an entire household awake after a day of labor. A frightening name was a quick way to establish a boundary.
Raw Head and Bloody Bones was part of the same broad tradition as warnings about haints near cemeteries, witches in the woods, boogermen under the bed, and water spirits in dangerous streams. These stories were not only entertainment. They were informal law. They told children where not to go, when to be quiet, and which invisible lines not to cross.
Of course, the cost could be real fear. Many adults who heard these stories as children remembered them for the rest of their lives. Some laughed about them later. Others admitted they had been deeply frightened. Folklore can protect and harm at the same time.
From British Bogey To Appalachian Memory
Raw Head and Bloody Bones traveled a long road.
It began, at least in written evidence, as an early modern English fright name. It entered dictionaries, educational criticism, nursery warnings, and political metaphor. Thomas Jefferson could use “rawhead & bloody bones” in 1818 as a figure for the way enemies had been taught to fear him. By then, the phrase was recognizable enough to work beyond the nursery.
In the American South, the figure entered Black and white oral traditions. In Appalachia, it settled into mountain storytelling, bedtime discipline, and family memory. Folklorists recorded it in Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and beyond. Writers and storytellers later reshaped it into books, performances, anthologies, and ghost-story collections.
But at its center, the figure remained simple.
Raw Head and Bloody Bones was the thing adults named when they wanted children to feel that darkness had teeth.
Why The Story Still Matters
Raw Head and Bloody Bones matters because it shows how old folklore survives by changing.
There is no single official version. That is not a weakness. It is the reason the figure lasted. It could be a British nursery terror, a Kentucky wonder tale, an African American bedtime rhyme, a Georgia thicket haint, a Tennessee window-scratcher, or a mountain mother’s quickest way to make twelve children dive under the covers.
For Appalachian history, the figure opens a window into childhood itself. It shows how stories moved across oceans, through oral tradition, into cabins, schools, and family lines. It shows how parents used fear to enforce safety and obedience. It also shows how children remembered those fears long after they had grown old enough to laugh at them.
Some monsters live because people believe in them. Others live because people remember being afraid.
Raw Head and Bloody Bones belongs to the second kind. He survives in the scratch on the screen, the warning at bedtime, the thicket no child wanted to enter, and the old mountain tale told one more time after dark.
Sources & Further Reading
Parton, Dolly. Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. https://archive.org/search?query=Dolly+My+Life+and+Other+Unfinished+Business
Parton, Dolly. “Bloody Bones, Scratch Eyes & The Boogie Man.” A Real Live Dolly. Recorded live in Sevierville, Tennessee, 1970. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Dolly+Parton+Bloody+Bones+Scratch+Eyes+The+Boogie+Man
Anderson, Glen Muncy, and Jane Muncy Fugate. “Two Versions of ‘Rawhead and Bloodybones’ from the Farmer-Muncy Family.” Journal of Folklore Research 38, nos. 1/2 (2001): 55–67. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3814800
Roberts, Leonard W. South from Hell-fer-Sartin: Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1955. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813101750/south-from-hell-fer-sartin/
Willis, Ninevah J. A Study of the Folklore of a Mountainous Section in Southwestern Virginia. Master’s thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 1955. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/items/9ab15a66-3c12-441b-9bde-f1a8bac79f2e
White, Newman Ivey, Frank C. Brown, and the North Carolina Folklore Society, eds. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Vol. 1. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001276410
White, Newman Ivey, Frank C. Brown, and the North Carolina Folklore Society, eds. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952. https://archive.org/details/frankcbrowncolle02fran
Talley, Thomas W. Negro Folk Rhymes: Wise and Otherwise. New York: Macmillan, 1922. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27195
Federal Writers’ Project. Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 4, Georgia Narratives. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1936–1938. https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/
Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. London: A. and J. Churchill, 1693. https://books.google.com/books/about/Some_Thoughts_Concerning_Education.html?id=OCUCAAAAQAAJ
Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. In The Works of John Locke, Vol. 8. London, 1823. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/locke-the-works-vol-8-some-thoughts-concerning-education-posthumous-works-familiar-letters
Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. London: W. Strahan, 1755. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/sjd_first_edition/
Wright, Elizabeth Mary. Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1913. https://archive.org/details/rusticspeechfolk00wriguoft
Gascoigne, George, attributed. “The Wyll of the Deuyll.” In Collectanea Anglo-Poetica, printed in Remains Historical and Literary Connected with the Palatine Counties of Lancaster and Chester. Manchester: Chetham Society, 1876. https://www.deanechurch.co.uk/library/BooksDigital/RemainsHistorical/Vol_100.pdf
Rastell, John. A Treatise Intitled, Beware of M. Jewell. Antwerp, 1566. https://www.oed.com/discover/raw-head-bloody-bones-and-other-terrors-of-the-nursery/
Jefferson, Thomas. “Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, 26 February 1818.” Founders Online, National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-12-02-0411
Jefferson, Thomas. “Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, February 22, 1821.” Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/mtjbib024015/
Taylor, Archer. “‘Raw Head and Bloody Bones.’” Journal of American Folklore 69, no. 272 (1956): 114, 175. https://www.jstor.org/stable/i223602
Halpert, Herbert. “Some Undeveloped Areas in American Folklore.” Journal of American Folklore 70, no. 278 (1957): 330–331. https://www.jstor.org/stable/537802
Simmons, Donald C. “A Further Note on Raw Head and Bloody Bones.” Journal of American Folklore 70, no. 278 (1957): 358. https://www.jstor.org/stable/537802
Lindahl, Carl. “Sounding a Shy Tradition: Oral and Written Styles of American Mountain Märchen.” Journal of Folklore Research 38, nos. 1/2 (2001): 75–98. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3814801
Lindahl, Carl. “Faces in the Fire: Images of Terror in Oral Märchen and in Literary Fairy Tales.” Journal of Folklore Research 46, no. 2 (2009): 151–181. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40600536
Sivinski, Stacy, ed. Fairy Tales of Appalachia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2023. https://utpress.org/title/fairy-tales-of-appalachia/
Sivinski, Stacy, ed. Fairy Tales of Appalachia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2023. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.28697807.1
Hamilton, Mary. Kentucky Folktales: Revealing Stories, Truths, and Outright Lies. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813136004/kentucky-folktales/
Briggs, Katharine M. The Fairies in Tradition and Literature. London: Routledge, 1967. https://archive.org/search?query=Katharine+Briggs+The+Fairies+in+Tradition+and+Literature
Briggs, Katharine M. An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976. https://archive.org/search?query=Katharine+Briggs+Encyclopedia+of+Fairies
Tongue, Ruth L. Somerset Folklore. London: Folklore Society, 1965. https://archive.org/search?query=Ruth+Tongue+Somerset+Folklore
Dictionary of American Regional English. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985–2013. https://www.daredictionary.com/
Maier, Eleanor. “Raw-head, Bloody Bones, and Other Terrors of the Nursery.” Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.oed.com/discover/raw-head-bloody-bones-and-other-terrors-of-the-nursery/
Poole, Scott. “Bloody Bones: A History of Southern Scares.” Deep South Magazine, October 17, 2014. https://deepsouthmag.com/2014/10/17/bloody-bones-a-history-of-southern-scares/
Barnette, Martha, and Grant Barrett. “Chilling Threat of Rawhead and Bloody Bones.” A Way with Words, June 2026. https://waywordradio.org/chilling-threat-of-rawhead-and-bloody-bones/
Lyons, Mary E. Raw Head, Bloody Bones: African-American Tales of the Supernatural. New York: Scribner’s, 1991. https://books.google.com/books/about/Raw_Head_Bloody_Bones.html?id=x-eAAAAAMAAJ
Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935. https://archive.org/search?query=Zora+Neale+Hurston+Mules+and+Men
Schlosser, S. E. “Raw Head and Bloody Bones: A Missouri Ghost Story.” AmericanFolklore.net. https://www.americanfolklore.net/raw-head-and-bloody-bones/
Author Note: This article treats Raw Head and Bloody Bones as folklore, not as a verified creature or single fixed legend. The old name matters because it shows how Appalachian families used fear, memory, and storytelling to teach children about darkness, danger, and obedience.