Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – Tailypo: A Southern Monster Tale with Deep Roots in Appalachian Communities
On a cold night in the Southern mountains, a single sound can carry a long way. Wind slips through the trees. A loose board on a cabin wall creaks. Somewhere out in the dark, a dog barks once and then goes quiet. Inside, children lean closer to the fire while an older voice lowers to a whisper and begins a story.
The storyteller describes a man who lives alone in a one room cabin deep in the woods with only his dogs for company. It is late autumn. The garden has failed. Game is scarce. Hunger has begun to press in. Out of that setting comes a creature with bright eyes and a long tail, a pot of stew, and a voice in the night that will not stop asking the same question.
“Tailypo. Tailypo. All I want is my tailypo.”
That refrain has echoed through cabins, classrooms, and campgrounds across Southern Appalachia for generations. Today the story people call “Tailypo” or “Taileybones” is one of the most familiar spooky tales in the region, a bridge between older oral traditions and modern horror for children. Folklorists now classify it as a Southern monster tale with particularly strong roots in Appalachian communities.
A Cabin, Three Dogs, And A Hungry Stranger
Most versions of Tailypo begin the same way. A poor man lives alone with three hounds in a rundown cabin far from town. A bad season has left his food stores empty. One night he takes his gun and the dogs into the woods, hoping to find anything they can eat. After a long, fruitless hunt he spots a strange animal. It is about the size of a dog, covered in dark fur, with glaring eyes and a long, twitching tail.
The man is hungry enough to shoot first and wonder later. When he fires, the animal escapes into the brush, but its tail falls to the ground. He takes that tail back to the cabin, cuts it up, and cooks it for supper. In some tellings he shares the meat with his dogs. In others he eats it alone and falls asleep beside the dying fire, finally full.
What follows is a slow tightening of the story. Outside, something scratches at the cabin wall or claws at the door. A voice in the dark calls, “Tailypo, Tailypo, who has my Tailypo” or “All I want is my Tailypo.” The man sends his dogs to chase it away. One comes back. Then none. Each time the voice returns, a little closer, until it is right at the foot of his bed.
In the grimmest mountain versions, the story ends with the creature tearing the man to pieces and leaving nothing but the chimney. In gentler print adaptations for children the ending softens. The old man may simply vanish. The cabin may be found empty the next day. What almost never changes is the idea that the creature returns again and again until it gets both its tail and its revenge. Folklorists who write about Tailypo point to that persistence as one reason the story still works so well as a “jump tale,” the kind told slowly in the dark and finished with a sudden shout.
An Appalachian Tale With Deep Southern Roots
Tailypo is usually described today as an Appalachian folktale, and it certainly belongs to the hills and hollers of the Southern mountains. Writers and storytellers locate it in Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, western North Carolina, and the hill country of southern Ohio and the Carolinas, the same belt of country the Appalachian Regional Commission recognizes as central Appalachia.
At the same time, scholars have noticed strong connections between Tailypo and older African American storytelling. The creature itself often looks like an exaggerated wild cat, a bobcat or panther turned into something stranger. It speaks in a raspy voice, uses simple English phrases, and demands the return of a body part, a pattern that echoes revenge tales carried from West Africa into the American South. Modern encyclopedias of folklore often list Tailypo as both African American and Appalachian, reflecting the way Black and white traditions have intertwined across the region for centuries.
The name shows how easily an oral story can change on the tongue. Printed collections and storytelling guides record forms like Tailypo, Taily Po, Taileypo, Taileybones, Tailbones, Tallie Tale, and even titles that drop the creature entirely in favor of phrases like “Chunk of Meat.” An annotated index of Appalachian folktales compiled through the AppLit project lists many of these spellings side by side, reminding readers that the story moved for decades by word of mouth before it settled into standard classroom versions.
From Oral Story To Books, Recordings, And Films
Older mountain families often remember Tailypo as a story told at home. In the twentieth century, though, it began to appear in print and on recordings, which helps historians trace how it traveled.
One influential teller was Jackie Torrence, a North Carolina storyteller whose distinctive voice and timing brought the tale to festival audiences and public libraries. A transcript credited to her version begins with a rundown house that “had holes in the ceiling, holes in the walls, and holes in the floor,” and then builds slowly toward the confrontation between the man and the creature at the end of his bed. That script, preserved today in educational materials and storytelling theses, captures the rhythm of a live performance and has helped keep Torrence’s take on the story in circulation long after the original recordings.
Children’s authors also embraced Tailypo. In 1977 Joanna C. Galdone and illustrator Paul Galdone published The Tailypo: A Ghost Story, a picture book that retold the Appalachian tale with bold art and a focus on suspense. Reviews and later interviews underline that Galdone leaned heavily on Appalachian sources and tried to preserve the story’s chill for young readers rather than sanding off every sharp edge. Jan Wahl and Wil Clay produced another version titled Tailypo a few years later, explicitly setting it “way down in the big woods of Tennessee” and pairing the story with rich painted scenes of cabin and forest.
By the 1990s and 2000s, Tailypo had followed the same path as other regional tales into audio, video, and online media. Educational catalogs list a classroom film titled Tailypo, an Appalachian Tale, while horror fans trade links to short films and podcasts that reinterpret the story for modern audiences. Storytelling and folklore podcasts like Spirits, The Dirt, and Spookery have all featured episodes that walk through the basic plot, highlight its Appalachian setting, and compare different variants.
Where The Story Lives In Southern Appalachia
Unlike some legends that cling to one specific hill or crossroads, Tailypo tends to float in a more general landscape: a cabin in the woods, a ridge above an unnamed hollow, a swamp or thicket just beyond the clearing. That vagueness makes it easy to imagine the story happening almost anywhere. Even so, modern retellings and scholarly notes sketch a rough map.
Urban Appalachian writers who have tried to pin the story down point out that many tellers place the cabin in the upland South, in the deep woods of Tennessee or the high ridges of Kentucky and West Virginia. Others situate it more broadly in “the Appalachian region,” a space that reaches from northern Alabama through the Carolinas and into the Ohio River counties. Podcast hosts who grew up in the mountains recall hearing Tailypo at school events or church camp, often alongside local ghost stories about specific creeks or graveyards.
In print for children the setting sometimes becomes more concrete. Wahl’s Tennessee woods, Galdone’s remote cabin, and later adaptations that mention particular counties or states all work to anchor the story in a recognizable Southern landscape. Library catalogues and book reviews usually classify these versions under Appalachian folklore, which in turn shapes how teachers and librarians introduce the tale to new generations.
Hunger, Isolation, And The Work Of A Scary Story
When folklorists step back from the jump scares, they tend to see Tailypo as more than a simple monster yarn. Scholars writing about ghost stories in contemporary folklore note that the tale circles around some of the most basic anxieties for rural families: running out of food, living far from neighbors, and facing the night with only thin walls between the cabin and whatever moves in the dark.
The old man’s decision to eat the tail reads differently when you remember the history of poor mountain households facing crop failure and hard winters. In many tellings he does not kill a neighbor’s cow or poach from someone else’s land. He takes a piece of a strange creature that does not quite belong to the ordinary world. Hunger makes him cross a boundary he does not fully understand.
Then there are the dogs. Generations of Appalachian families have relied on dogs not only for hunting but for warning, companionship, and protection when men had to be away working. One reason Tailypo bites so deep is that the creature takes those safeguards away one by one. Each time the man sends a dog outside, the woods claim it, until he is truly alone.
Writers like Diane Goldstein and Jeffrey Webb argue that the story also works as a quiet lesson about how people treat animals and the land around them. Children who hear Tailypo are invited to think about what happens when someone harms a creature simply because they can, without respect or caution. The revenge that follows may be supernatural, but the underlying message about consequences is familiar in many Appalachian households.
Tailypo In The Twenty First Century
Even as fewer children grow up in one room cabins or rely on hounds for their safety, Tailypo has hung on. In some places it has even gained new life.
Horror and folklore websites feature essays on the tale as one of the “creepiest stories in Appalachian folklore,” often highlighting its blend of animal and ghostly traits. Recent online encyclopedias describe it as a catlike creature from African American and Appalachian tradition and point to its long tail, glowing eyes, and rasping voice as key details that modern artists pick up in illustrations. Contemporary fiction writers fold Tailypo into Southern Gothic short stories, while Appalachian studies scholars mention it alongside better known figures like Mothman or the Greenbrier Ghost when they talk about regional monsters.
Podcasts and streaming video make it easier than ever to hear different tellers. A child in east Tennessee can now listen to a North Carolina storyteller, a Cincinnati folklorist, or a Kentucky teacher spin the same basic tale with different pacing, dialect, and endings. Classroom teachers use the story to open conversations about oral tradition, geography, and the way stories adapt when they move from spoken word to print.
Through all those changes, the core scene remains simple. An isolated person makes a choice in the middle of a hungry season. A creature that is not quite animal and not quite ghost comes back to collect what was taken. A voice in the dark repeats a single phrase until the listener either laughs with relief or jumps at the final shout.
For Southern Appalachia, Tailypo is not just a Halloween thrill. It is a reminder of how much work a single story can do in a region where the line between ordinary life and the supernatural has always felt thin.
Sources & Further Reading
Goldstein, Diane E., Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas. Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/18
Webb, Jeffrey B. “Tailypo.” In American Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales: An Encyclopedia of American Folklore, edited by Christopher R. Fee and Jeffrey B. Webb. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2016. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/american-myths-legends-and-tall-tales-9781610695671/
“Tailypo.” Wikipedia. Accessed January 13, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailypo
Templeton, Mike. “Tailypo, Tailypo, Who or What Is Tailypo.” Urban Appalachian Community Coalition (blog), October 9, 2022. https://uacvoice.org/2022/10/tailypo-tailypo-who-or-what-is-tailypo/
Templeton, Mike. “Luke Bauserman and American Mythology.” Urban Appalachian Community Coalition (blog), October 16, 2022. https://uacvoice.org/2022/10/luke-bauserman-and-american-mythology/
Galdone, Joanna C. The Tailypo: A Ghost Story. Illustrated by Paul Galdone. New York: Clarion Books, 1977. https://archive.org/details/tailypoghoststor00gald
Wahl, Jan. Tailypo! Illustrated by Wil Clay. New York: Henry Holt, 1991. https://www.amazon.com/Tailypo-Jan-Wahl/dp/0805006877
Medearis, Angela Shelf. Tailypo: A Newfangled Tall Tale. Illustrated by Sterling Brown. New York: Holiday House, 1996. https://archive.org/details/tailyponewfangle0000mede
Ferrum College. “Tailypo.” AppLit: Resources for the Study of Appalachian Literature and Culture. Ferrum College. http://www.ferrum.edu/applit/bibs/tales/tailypo.htm
Bentley-Edwards, Melissa A. “The Role of Humor in Ghost Story Telling.” M.A. thesis, East Tennessee State University, 2006. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3565
Torrence, Jackie. “Tailypo.” Storytelling script (transcript of oral performance), n.d. https://m3englishmd.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/tailypo-script.pdf
Library of Congress. “International Storytelling Collection – Folktales and Storytelling.” Folklife & Ethnographic Collections Research Guide. Includes Jackie Torrence recordings featuring “Tailypo.” https://guides.loc.gov/folktales-oral-storytelling/international-storytelling-collection
“Tailypo w/ Eric Schneider.” Spirits: Mythology, Legends, & Folklore (podcast). Multitude Productions. https://art19.com/shows/spirits/episodes/tailypo-w-eric-schneider
“S1 E8: The Tale of the Tailypo.” Spookery (podcast), Ausha, 2023. https://podcast.ausha.co/spookery/episode-8-the-tale-of-the-tailypo
“Tailypo.” Monstropedia: The Online Encyclopedia of Monsters. https://www.monstropedia.org/index.php/Tailypo
Author Note: This piece is my way of setting that jump-scare story inside the larger Southern monster tradition that links African American and Appalachian communities and says something real about hunger, isolation, and the thin line between our world and whatever waits just outside the cabin door.