Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – The Great Leech of Tlanusi’yi: Cherokee Memory at Murphy’s Deep River Place
At Murphy, North Carolina, the Valley River joins the Hiwassee in a place where water, stone, trail, and memory come together. Long before the town took its later name, the place was known in Cherokee tradition as Tlanusi’yi, the Leech Place. The name did not come from a surveyor’s map or a county courthouse record. It came from a story.
James Mooney recorded that just above the junction of the two rivers was a deep hole in the Valley River. Above that hole lay a ledge of rock running across the stream, once used like a natural bridge. On the south side, the trail climbed a high bank where travelers could look down into the water. It was there, according to the old Cherokee account, that men once saw something red lying on the rock ledge below them, large as a house.
At first it seemed like an object. Then it began to move.
It unrolled, stretched itself along the rock, and showed itself as a great leech with red and white stripes along its body. Then it rolled back into a ball, stretched again, and crawled down into the deep water. The river began to boil and foam. A column of white spray rose into the air and fell like a waterspout on the very place where the men had stood. They escaped only because they ran in time.
That is the oldest full printed version of “The Great Leech of Tlanusi’yi.” It is a short story, but it is not a small one. It belongs to Cherokee place memory, to the rivers around Murphy, and to a larger world in which water was not empty scenery. Water was power, danger, medicine, boundary, and life.
The Story Mooney Recorded
The most important printed source for the Great Leech is James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee, published in 1902 in the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Mooney collected much of his material during fieldwork among Cherokee people in western North Carolina and Indian Territory in the late nineteenth century.
His book must be used carefully. It is not a Cherokee-authored work in the modern sense. It is an ethnographic record made by a non-Cherokee scholar working inside a federal institution. Still, it is also one of the major source trails for Cherokee stories because Mooney named many of the Cherokee people who told, corrected, and confirmed the accounts he printed.
For the Great Leech story, Mooney’s note is especially important. He wrote that he first heard the legend from Swimmer and Chief N. J. Smith. He added that it was confirmed by Wafford and others, and that it was one of the best-known Cherokee myths, preserved in the Cherokee name for Murphy.
That note gives the story more weight than a vague folklore retelling. Swimmer, whose Cherokee name was A’yûñ’inĭ, was one of Mooney’s most important sources. Mooney described him as a keeper of tradition, priest, doctor, and authority among the Eastern Band. Chief Nimrod Jarrett Smith, known in Cherokee as Tsalădihĭ’, was born near Murphy in 1837 and remembered the Removal period through the earliest memories of his life. James D. Wafford, a western Cherokee source, preserved additional details and variants.
The story, then, did not reach print as a nameless campfire tale. It came through named Cherokee informants, then through Mooney’s pen, then through the long life of the printed page.
A Monster in a Specific Place
The Great Leech belongs to a precise landscape. Mooney placed Tlanusi’yi at Murphy, where the Valley River joins the Hiwassee. He described a deep hole, a rock ledge across the river, and a trail that passed near the water. His notes also explain that the strange appearance at the bottom of the deep hole may have helped hold the story in place.
Mooney wrote that people looking down into the water believed they could see something alive moving at the bottom, though the ripples made its shape unclear. He noted that the hole was caused by a sudden drop or split in the rock bed of the stream. He also recorded a local story that a tinsmith once tried to sink a powder-filled tin bomb into the water to blow up the strange object and see what it was, but the device failed.
These details matter because Appalachian folklore often becomes detached from geography. A story gets repeated until the place becomes vague, or until the creature matters more than the land. Tlanusi’yi works the other way. The story is tied to a named water place. It explains why people remembered a dangerous river crossing. It gives meaning to a deep hole, a ledge, and a river junction.
The Leech Place is not just where the story happened. In the older tradition, the place and the story are inseparable.
Bodies on the Bank and the Young Man Who Laughed
Mooney’s version of the story carries the warning further. More than one person, he wrote, was swept down by the water. Their friends later found the bodies on the bank with the ears and nose eaten away. After that, people became afraid to cross the rock ledge or even travel that part of the trail.
Then came the familiar figure found in many old warning stories, the brave young man who laughed at fear. He said he was not afraid of anything in the Valley River. One day he painted his face, dressed in his finest buckskin, and started toward the river while the people followed at a distance.
He walked out onto the ledge singing that he would tie red leech skins on his legs for garters. Before he was halfway across, the water boiled into white foam. A great wave rose over the rock, swept him into the river, and he was never seen again.
That part of the story is easy to read as a simple caution against arrogance. But in Cherokee story tradition, danger is often more than physical danger. The young man is not merely careless around water. He speaks lightly about a being and a place that others know to treat with caution. His mistake is not only that he steps onto the ledge. His mistake is that he mocks what the place means.
The Removal Memory in the Story
The Great Leech story also carries a later memory from just before Removal. Mooney wrote that two women went out on the ledge to fish. Their friends warned them not to go, but one woman with a baby on her back said there were fish there and she was tired of fat meat. She laid the child down on the rock and began preparing her line.
Then the water suddenly rose and swept over the ledge. The wave would have carried off the child if the mother had not reached the baby in time.
This detail brings the story close to the 1830s, when Cherokee life in western North Carolina stood under the threat and violence of Removal. Chief N. J. Smith, one of Mooney’s sources, was born near Murphy in 1837. His earliest memories, according to Mooney, reached back to the suffering of Cherokee people during that period. The story’s Removal-era scene is therefore not just an extra episode. It ties the old river danger to a time of hunger, displacement, pressure, and loss.
Murphy itself became tied to that history in a direct way. The town’s official history notes that the Cherokee knew the site along the Hiwassee as Tlanusi-yi, the Leech Place. It also states that Fort Butler was built there during Cherokee removal and served as a main collection point for Cherokee people east of the mountains before they were taken along the Unicoi Turnpike toward Fort Cass.
The Great Leech is not a Trail of Tears story in the narrow sense. It is older than that. But by the time Mooney recorded it, the story had absorbed Removal-era memory. The same place that held the old water being also became part of the historical road of forced removal.
The Leech, the Turtle, and an 1848 Travel Account
Mooney was not the first outside writer to record a strange-water tradition at Murphy. Charles Lanman, in Letters from the Alleghany Mountains, published in 1849, described Murphy after a visit in 1848. Lanman wrote that the village stood at the junction of the Owassa, or Hiwassee, and Valley rivers. He gave the Indian name as Klausuna and translated it as the Large Turtle.
Mooney later noted that Lanman had incorrectly made the leech a turtle. Even with that mistake, Lanman’s account is valuable. It shows that an outside observer heard a place-name and creature story connected to Murphy before Mooney’s later fieldwork. Lanman also recorded local talk about a deep hole near Murphy and a supposed underground connection between the Hiwassee and the Nottely River.
That underground waterway idea also appears in Mooney’s note. He wrote that some believed the leech could pass between the deep hole near Murphy and another place on the Nottely, which was also called Tlanusi’yi. People said the water boiled there too.
The turtle in Lanman and the leech in Mooney should not be treated as equal versions without caution. Mooney had Cherokee sources for the leech and specifically corrected Lanman. Still, Lanman helps show that the Murphy water tradition was being noticed in print by the middle of the nineteenth century.
Quoneashee and the Older Cherokee Landscape
Tlanusi’yi also reaches into the older Cherokee settlement landscape. Mooney identified Quoneashee with Tlanusi’yi, on the Hiwassee near present Murphy. The name appears in connection with Colonel George Chicken’s 1715 to 1716 expedition account during the Yamasee War era.
This early colonial source does not give the Great Leech story. It should not be used as if it proves the creature legend. Its value is different. It helps place the Murphy area inside a much older Cherokee geography, long before county lines, tourist roads, and modern town histories.
By the early eighteenth century, the Hiwassee and surrounding towns stood inside a complex world of Cherokee diplomacy, war, trade, and pressure from neighboring Native nations and colonial powers. The story of the Great Leech is not separate from that world. It belongs to a Cherokee homeland marked by towns, trails, rivers, sacred places, and remembered names.
A careful article should therefore avoid treating Tlanusi’yi as only a monster site. It was also part of a named Cherokee landscape.
Water as Power and Warning
Modern readers often want to sort stories into categories. Was the Great Leech a monster story, a natural hazard story, a place-name story, or a sacred-water story? It may be all of these, but none of those labels should flatten it.
Cherokee traditions give water deep meaning. Rivers and streams were not merely routes or resources. In Cherokee religious and ceremonial life, going to water was a practice of cleansing, renewal, medicine, and prayer. Water could heal. Water could carry power. Water could also hold danger.
The Leech Place sits inside that larger understanding. The water in the story does not behave like ordinary current. It rises, boils, foams, and reaches for people. The deep hole is not only a feature of river geology. It is a place where something unseen lives below the surface.
This is one reason the Great Leech should not be reduced to a cryptid. A cryptid story usually asks whether a creature might still be found. The older Cherokee story asks something different. What kind of place is this? What power lives in water? What happens when people mock what their community has learned to respect?
Place-Names That Remember
One of the strongest historical features of the story is the name itself. Tlanusi’yi means the Leech Place. Mooney emphasized that the legend was embodied in the Cherokee name for Murphy. The Town of Murphy’s modern history page still acknowledges that older Cherokee name and its connection to the giant leech.
This is important because place-names can preserve memory after other forms of record are broken. A written document may disappear. A town may be renamed. A trail may become a road. But an older name can still hold a story inside it.
Scholars of Cherokee wonder stories have noted how place-names in these traditions do historical and cultural work. They do not simply label the land. They preserve relationships between people and place. In the case of Tlanusi’yi, the name keeps the story fastened to Murphy, the Hiwassee, the Valley River, the ledge, and the deep water.
The name is the archive.
The Problem of the Source Trail
Writing about the Great Leech requires care because the most accessible early source is Mooney. He is essential, but he is not the final voice of Cherokee tradition. He recorded and organized stories through the methods and assumptions of his time. He sometimes translated, summarized, corrected, arranged, and interpreted what he heard.
That does not mean his work should be dismissed. For Tlanusi’yi, his record is strong because he names Cherokee sources and gives notes about variants and confirmations. But it does mean the reader should remember the path between oral tradition and printed text.
The best way to handle the story is to keep the source trail visible. Swimmer, Chief N. J. Smith, Wafford, and others stand behind Mooney’s printed version. Lanman stands as an earlier outside witness to a related but mistaken version. Modern Cherokee-centered scholarship and public-history work help return attention to place, memory, and continuing Cherokee presence.
The story should not be told as if Cherokee people vanished into the past. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians remains in western North Carolina. Cherokee memory, language work, cultural interpretation, and historical scholarship continue.
The Leech Place Today
Today, Murphy is a small mountain town, but beneath the later layers of roads, buildings, courthouse history, and tourism remains the older river place. The official town history still names Tlanusi-yi. The Cherokee County Historical Museum interprets Cherokee history and the Trail of Tears. The National Park Service includes the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail as a route of forced removal across nine states, including North Carolina.
A visitor walking near the rivers today may not see the same ledge Mooney described, and river landscapes change with time, flood, construction, and memory. But the story remains attached to the confluence. It still asks the reader to look at Murphy not only as a town, but as a Cherokee place.
That is where the Great Leech has its historical force. It does not survive because it is the strangest monster in the mountains. It survives because it belongs to a place whose name remembered it.
More Than a River Monster
The Great Leech of Tlanusi’yi is frightening in the way old water stories are frightening. It comes from below. It appears where people cross. It turns a familiar river into a living danger. It punishes the careless and nearly takes the helpless. It moves between deep places through a hidden waterway. It leaves only traces, foam, waves, bodies, and something moving beneath the ripples.
But it is also more than a fright tale. It is a story about how land remembers. It is about a Cherokee name that held a warning. It is about the deep relationship between rivers and memory in the Southern Appalachians. It is about the care needed when using older sources recorded by outsiders. It is about Murphy before Murphy, before the name on the map replaced the older name at the water.
To tell the story carefully is not to ask whether a giant leech still lies in the river. The better question is what the story teaches about the world that placed it there. At Tlanusi’yi, water was not empty. A crossing was not only a crossing. A deep hole was not only a deep hole. The river had a memory, and the people had a name for it.
Sources & Further Reading
Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. In Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897–1898, 3–548. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/91694
Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. Project Gutenberg edition. Accessed June 10, 2026. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45634/45634-h/45634-h.htm
Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. Internet Sacred Text Archive edition. Accessed June 10, 2026. https://sacred-texts.com/nam/cher/motc/index.htm
Lanman, Charles. Letters from the Alleghany Mountains. New York: Geo. P. Putnam, 1849. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48408/48408-h/48408-h.htm
Lanman, Charles. Letters from the Alleghany Mountains. New York: Geo. P. Putnam, 1849. HathiTrust catalog record. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008652156
Chicken, George. “A Letter from Carolina in 1715, and Journal of the March of the Carolinians into the Cherokee Mountains, in the Yemassee Indian War, 1715–1716.” In Year Book of the City of Charleston, 1894, edited by Langdon Cheves. Charleston, SC: News and Courier Book Presses, 1894. https://archive.org/details/yearbookcityofch00unse_6
North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. “Cherokee War, Q-10.” North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program. Updated January 23, 2024. https://www.dncr.nc.gov/blog/2024/01/23/cherokee-war-q-10
McPherson, O. M. Indians of North Carolina: Letter from the Secretary of the Interior. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1915. https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/mcpherson/mcpherson.html
Kirk, Deborah Lyn. “Visualizing the Cherokee Homeland through Indigenous Historical GIS: An Interactive Map of James Mooney’s Ethnographic Fieldwork and Cherokee Collective Memory.” M.A. thesis, University of Kansas, 2013. https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/entities/publication/16f1564f-d0da-4bbf-89b3-eff7f7aacee1
National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Cherokee Subject Guide. 2025. https://mads.si.edu/mads/id/NMNH-NAASubjectGuide_Cherokee_2025
National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. “MS 2425-b, Transcriptions and Notes Related to Cherokee Archaeology.” Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives. https://sova.si.edu/record/naa.ms2425b
Mooney, James, and Frans M. Olbrechts, ed. The Swimmer Manuscript: Cherokee Sacred Formulas and Medicinal Prescriptions. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 99. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1932. https://archive.org/details/swimmermanuscrip00moon
Duncan, Barbara R., and Brett H. Riggs. Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook. Chapel Hill: Museum of the Cherokee Indian and University of North Carolina Press, 2003. https://uncpress.org/9780807854570/cherokee-heritage-trails-guidebook/
National Park Service. “Trail of Tears Guidebooks.” Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. Updated February 13, 2019. https://www.nps.gov/trte/planyourvisit/trail-of-tears-guidebooks.htm
UNC Research. “Cherokee Trails.” Endeavors. Spring 2003. https://endeavors.unc.edu/spr2003/cherokee.html
Martin, Michael S. “Settlement, Cultural Memory, and Sacred Sites: The Function of Place-Names within the Cherokee Wonder Stories.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 31, nos. 3–4 (2019): 36–57. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/studamerindilite.31.issue-3-4
Gragson, Ted L., and Paul V. Bolstad. “A Local Analysis of Early-Eighteenth-Century Cherokee Settlement.” Social Science History 31, no. 3 (2007): 435–468. https://doi.org/10.1215/01455532-2007-005
Smithers, Gregory D. “Water Stories: Deep Histories of Climate Change, Ecological Resilience and the Riverine World of the Cherokees.” Journal of the British Academy 9, supplement 6 (2021): 27–59. https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/009s6.027
Dembling, Sam. “Rivers Held a Spiritual Place in the Lives of the Cherokee.” Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2019. https://www.neh.gov/article/rivers-held-spiritual-place-lives-cherokee
Town of Murphy, North Carolina. “About Murphy.” Accessed June 10, 2026. https://www.townofmurphync.com/community/page/about-murphy
Town of Murphy, North Carolina. “Murphy Riverwalk.” Accessed June 10, 2026. https://www.townofmurphync.com/community/page/murphy-riverwalk
Town of Murphy, North Carolina. “County Historical Museum.” Accessed June 10, 2026. https://www.townofmurphync.com/community/page/county-historical-museum
Cherokee County Historical Museum. “Cherokee County Historical Museum and Trail of Tears Interpretive Center.” Accessed June 10, 2026. https://cchistoricalmuseum.com/
Cherokee County, North Carolina. “Historical Museum.” Accessed June 10, 2026. https://www.cherokeecounty-nc.gov/183/Historical-Museum
North Carolina Trail of Tears Association. “Fort Butler.” Accessed June 10, 2026. https://nctrailoftears.org/wayside-exhibits/fort-butler/
National Park Service. “What Happened on the Trail of Tears?” Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. Updated April 23, 2025. https://www.nps.gov/trte/learn/historyculture/what-happened-on-the-trail-of-tears.htm
Author Note: This article follows the strongest printed version of the story while keeping Mooney’s role as a non-Cherokee collector clear. Cherokee place memory is treated here as history tied to land, water, language, and continuing Cherokee presence.