Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – The Hairy Women of Klipnocky: Allegany County’s Wild Women Legend
In the hills outside Canaseraga, New York, stone walls disappear beneath hardwoods, abandoned quarries collect dark water, and old farm fields have returned to forest. The country is rugged enough that a person can leave the road and quickly feel separated from the farms and villages of Allegany County. Somewhere within those woods, according to generations of local storytelling, live the Hairy Women of Klipnocky.
They have been described as abandoned sisters, wild women, forest creatures, descendants of Bigfoot, and wandering figures that slip between the trees before a witness can see them clearly. Hunters blame them for missing possessions. Farmers have recalled dark shapes moving at the edges of their fields. Some residents have spoken of screams coming from the forest, while others treat the Hairy Women with the humor reserved for a familiar local character.
The historical record does not prove that strange women ever lived in Klipnocky State Forest. It does, however, show that the legend became deeply rooted in Canaseraga and the surrounding communities. Over time, the Hairy Women grew into something larger than a frightening story. They became part of the cultural identity of Appalachian New York.
The Girls Who Waited in the Forest
The version of the legend commemorated by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation begins with a family living near the forest. The parents were required to leave their daughters alone and instructed the girls to run into the woods if anyone approached the house. The parents never returned. According to the story, they had been killed, and the family home later burned.
Neighbors assumed that the daughters had died in the fire. Years later, objects reportedly began disappearing from nearby properties. People heard screams in the forest and claimed to see large, hairy women moving through the trees. The girls, the legend explained, had survived in the wilderness and continued waiting for parents who would never come home.
A roadside marker erected near Canaseraga in 2018 presents this version in only a few lines. It describes the Hairy Women as girls who still inhabit the forest, “waiting for their parents’ return,” and gives August 18, 1926, as the date of the first sighting. The marker stands at 1329 County Route 13C and was sponsored through the Marjorie Dieter Mastin Historical Society.
Like many community legends, the story changes depending on who tells it. In another version, there were six sisters whose parents died in an automobile accident on the same night that their house burned. With no home and nowhere else to go, the sisters fled into Klipnocky and gradually became the wild figures later seen by farmers and hunters.
Other explanations are more playful. Some residents have called the women descendants of Bigfoot. Others have said that they were outsiders or hippies who moved into the forest and abandoned ordinary society. These competing versions do not weaken the legend. They reveal how oral traditions expand as each generation reshapes them to fit its own fears, humor, and understanding of the woods.
A Story with More Than One Beginning
The date on the historical marker gives the legend an appearance of precision. August 18, 1926, sounds like the kind of date that might have been taken from a newspaper report, police record, or written statement from a witness. The surviving evidence is not that simple.
The Pomeroy Foundation classifies the Hairy Women marker under its Legends & Lore program. The program is designed to recognize folktales and stories popularly regarded as historical even when they cannot be verified as ordinary historical events. Its source standards specifically state that primary sources are not required. Oral histories, interviews, local publications, websites, photographs, and other materials can be used to establish that a tradition has circulated through a community.
That distinction matters when examining the supposed 1926 sighting. A detailed local history published for the Town of Burns in 1976 includes a chronology of community events. Its entry for 1926 records Canaseraga’s Clean Up Day and a spring outbreak involving eleven cases of scarlet fever and one case of measles. It does not mention an August encounter with the Hairy Women or any unusual discovery in Klipnocky.
The omission does not prove that no story existed. Local histories are never complete, and the booklet’s own authors warned that the surviving records were thin. They explained that official documents from much of the nineteenth century were missing, probably because of the devastating Canaseraga fire of 1895. Still, the absence of the Hairy Women from the 1976 history means that the exact date on the marker should be treated as a date preserved within the legend, not as a conclusively documented historical event.
There is also another local claim about the first witness. Writer Ryan Dennis, who grew up on a farm bordering the forest, recalled hearing that a man named Archie Miller rushed into Canaseraga during the 1960s and described the animal-like women he had encountered. Dennis identified Miller as the alleged first person to see them.
The 1926 marker date and the 1960s Archie Miller story cannot both be accepted as an uncomplicated first sighting. Instead, they show that the Hairy Women have more than one beginning. One version may have been remembered by the historical society, while another circulated among families, farmers, and people gathered around Canaseraga’s coffee machines.
The Older Place Called Klipnocky
Although the beginning of the Hairy Women story remains uncertain, the name Klipnocky is much older than the legend’s recorded twentieth-century versions.
The 1976 Town of Burns history reproduced a short item from the Canaseraga Times in 1874. It reported that a hurried young couple had been married by “Rev. Farnum of Klipknocky.” The spelling differs slightly from the modern form, but the newspaper notice establishes that the name was already attached to the locality more than fifty years before the date placed on the folklore marker.
The origin of Klipnocky remains uncertain. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation acknowledges that no definite explanation for the name has been established. Whatever its linguistic beginnings, Klipnocky became associated with a remote section of eastern Allegany County, and its unusual sound helped give the legend a memorable home.
A creature called merely a wild woman could belong almost anywhere. A Hairy Woman of Klipnocky belongs to one particular forest.
A Landscape Made for a Legend
Klipnocky State Forest covers more than 2,700 acres across the towns of Almond, Birdsall, and Burns. It borders Slader Creek and Gas Springs state forests, creating a larger expanse of wooded country broken by ridges, streams, trails, old quarries, and the remains of earlier settlement.
The forest is not untouched wilderness. Nearly half of its acreage had once been cleared and farmed before the state acquired the land. Stone walls still run through the woods, marking fields that disappeared beneath the trees. Some of the rocks in those walls are remarkably large, reminders of the labor required to cultivate the steep ground before tractors and modern machinery.
Old stone quarries add another layer to the landscape. Quarrying continued in the area during the construction of Almond Dam in the 1940s, and several abandoned pits were later converted into wildlife ponds. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps planted red pine, white pine, Scotch pine, larch, spruce, and other conifers across former fields. These planted stands now mix with maple, oak, beech, ash, and hemlock.
The result is a forest shaped by repeated cycles of settlement and abandonment. A hiker may pass a stone wall without seeing the vanished farm that created it or walk beside a flooded quarry without knowing what once happened there. Human history lies everywhere in Klipnocky, but much of it has been obscured by vegetation and time.
Such places naturally produce stories. A noise may echo from a quarry. A deer standing upright among saplings can briefly resemble a person. A hunter searching for a familiar trail can become disoriented when the light fades. The forest does not need supernatural inhabitants to create uncertainty, but uncertainty gives supernatural stories somewhere to live.
Mischief at the Edge of the Fields
The Hairy Women are not always described as violent. In many local accounts, they behave more like troublesome neighbors or forest tricksters.
Dennis recalled stories of hunters who entered Klipnocky and returned confused after possessions disappeared. A missing hat or unexplained disturbance might be blamed on the women. Farmers working near the woods supposedly caught glimpses of hunched figures slipping through the trees while fields were being plowed or hay was being cut.
Dennis also remembered being told that a “Hairy Women of Klipnocky Crossing” sign once stood on his family’s property. Whether intended as a warning or a joke, the sign placed the legend directly into the working landscape. The Hairy Women did not inhabit a distant fantasy world. They lived beyond the pasture, behind the stone wall, or inside the shadowed tree line bordering a family farm.
This closeness helps explain the legend’s endurance. Stories tied to ordinary places are repeatedly renewed. A child hears about the women while riding past the forest. A hunter repeats the story after returning from the woods. A farmer sees something indistinct at dusk and adds another possible encounter to the community’s memory.
The legend survives because Klipnocky remains visible and accessible. The forest is always there, offering another chance for someone to look between the trees and wonder whether a dark figure is looking back.
The Canaseraga Creek Crier
One of the most important moments in the modern life of the legend came through a small community publication called the Canaseraga Creek Crier.
When Dennis was about fourteen years old, the Crier invited readers to submit stories about the Hairy Women. He spent the summer writing what became a ten-part series. The installments continued through much of the year, and community interest in the publication increased as residents waited for the next chapter.
The series also encouraged people to begin discussing the Hairy Women again. Residents approached the young writer with personal experiences and accounts inherited from parents and grandparents. Some told him what they believed they had encountered. Others repeated versions that had been circulating within their families for decades.
Dennis later recognized that the importance of the series did not depend on whether every story was literally true. The people of Canaseraga saw their community, landscape, and shared traditions represented in writing. The Hairy Women belonged to them, and seeing the legend recorded gave it renewed life.
The local Fall Harvest Festival eventually incorporated a Hairy Women look-alike contest as a central attraction. What had begun as a frightening story about abandoned girls and shadowy figures became a source of celebration, humor, and community participation.
A Legend Placed Beside the Road
The 2018 marker gave the Hairy Women a permanent place in the public history of Allegany County. Its deep red design identifies it as folklore rather than an ordinary historical marker, but its presence beside the road still carries authority. Travelers who might never have heard the story are introduced to the waiting daughters and the forest they supposedly inhabit.
The marker was not intended to certify that large, hairy women were scientifically or historically proven to have lived in Klipnocky. It recognizes that the story itself is genuine folklore, passed through the larger community and connected to a particular place. That is a different kind of historical importance.
The Marjorie Dieter Mastin Historical Society, named for one of the historians who helped prepare the 1976 Town of Burns history, served as the grant recipient. The society continues collecting artifacts, photographs, records, and local accounts connected to Burns and Canaseraga. Its involvement brought together formal preservation work and a legend maintained largely through conversation and community memory.
Not the Cherokee Little People
The Hairy Women of Klipnocky are sometimes discussed alongside other Appalachian forest beings, but they should not be identified as the Cherokee Little People, known as the Yûñwĭ Tsunsdi or Yunwi Tsunsdi.
The two traditions come from different peoples, regions, and cultural settings. The Hairy Women are part of the local folklore of western New York and are usually portrayed as large or human-sized wild women. The Cherokee Little People belong to Cherokee tradition in the southern Appalachian region and are described as small spirit beings associated with caves, rocks, music, healing, and encounters in the mountains. The research supplied for this article correctly separates the two traditions rather than attempting to turn the Klipnocky legend into a Cherokee story.
A cultural publication from the Cherokee Nation preserves one account in which the Yunwi Tsunsdi carry a wounded warrior into a cave, treat him with dogwood and elderberry, and eventually return him to his village. Nothing in that story resembles the abandoned sisters, Bigfoot-like women, or twentieth-century sightings associated with Klipnocky.
Treating the traditions as interchangeable would erase the specific history of both. The Cherokee Little People should be approached through Cherokee sources and Cherokee cultural knowledge. The Hairy Women should be understood as a distinct Allegany County legend whose development can be followed through local memories, publications, festivals, and the modern folklore marker.
Folklore as Community History
A legend does not need to describe a verifiable creature to reveal historical truth.
The Hairy Women reflect the isolation of the Klipnocky landscape, the disappearance of farms into state forest, and the uneasiness created by abandoned quarries and old walls. They also reflect the ways small communities preserve identity. Canaseraga residents told the story at home, repeated it among neighbors, published it in a local flyer, celebrated it at a festival, and eventually placed it on a roadside marker.
The contradictions are part of that history. The women may be abandoned sisters in one telling and wild descendants of Bigfoot in another. Their first sighting may belong to 1926 on the marker or to Archie Miller in the 1960s. They may scream in the night, steal hats from hunters, or simply move as dark shadows beyond a field.
Folklore rarely remains fixed. It changes because the people telling it change. Each version reveals something about the generation that preserved it.
The Women Still in the Woods
Today, the Finger Lakes Trail passes through Klipnocky State Forest and skirts several of its old quarries. Hikers, hunters, campers, and snowshoers can enter the same rough country that inspired the legend. The state describes the Hairy Women as part of the forest’s local folklore, placing them beside the documented history of farming, quarrying, reforestation, and recreation.
No surviving public record examined for this article proves that six sisters disappeared into Klipnocky or that strange women were witnessed there on August 18, 1926. What can be documented is the persistence of the story.
The Hairy Women survived through the memories of local residents, the writing of a fourteen-year-old boy, conversations with older generations, a festival contest, the work of a historical society, and a red marker beside a rural road.
In that sense, the women have never left the forest. They remain wherever the old fields fade into trees, wherever a hunter discovers that something is missing, and wherever someone near Canaseraga looks toward Klipnocky at dusk and wonders what might be moving among the shadows.
Sources & Further Reading
Canaseraga-Town of Burns Sesquicentennial-Bicentennial Committee. Town of Burns: A History. Canaseraga, NY: Canaseraga-Town of Burns Sesquicentennial-Bicentennial Committee, 1976. https://www.alleganyhistory.org/images/stories/Places/Places_Pdf/TownsAndVilliages_Pdf/Burns/History_of_Town_of_Burns.pdf
Canaseraga Fall Harvest Festival. “Hairy Women of Klipnocky.” Accessed August 1, 2026. https://www.canaseragafestival.com/hairy-women-of-klipnocky.html
Canaseraga Fall Harvest Festival. “The Legend of Klipnocky.” August 29, 2012. https://www.canaseragafestival.com/blog/the-legend-of-klipnocky
Dennis, Ryan. “The Hairy Women of Klipnocky.” The Milk House, February 17, 2020. https://www.themilkhouse.org/the-hairy-women-of-klipnocky/
Dennis, Ryan. “The Milk House: The Hairy Women of Klipnocky.” Progressive Dairy, January 18, 2013. https://www.agproud.com/blogs/1-progressive-dairy-from-the-editor/post/28737-the-milk-house-the-hairy-women-of-klipnocky
Historical Marker Database. “A Hairy Legend Historical Marker.” Accessed August 1, 2026. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=127569
Marjorie Dieter Mastin Historical Society. “Marjorie Dieter Mastin Historical Society.” Accessed August 1, 2026. https://mdmhs1826.weebly.com/
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. 2017 Draft Allegany Unit State Forests Unit Management Plan. Albany: New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, 2017. https://extapps.dec.ny.gov/docs/regions_pdf/ausfump2.pdf
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “Klipnocky State Forest.” Accessed August 1, 2026. https://dec.ny.gov/places/klipnocky-state-forest
New York State Library. “Allegany County Newspapers on Microfilm at the New York State Library.” Accessed August 1, 2026. https://www.nysl.nysed.gov/nysnp/102
Allegany County Historical Society. “Newspaper Archives.” Accessed August 1, 2026. https://www.alleganyhistory.org/index.php/newspaper-archives
Town and Village of Almond Comprehensive Plan Board. Comprehensive Plan: Town and Village of Almond, New York. Almond, NY: Town and Village of Almond, 2018. https://www.alleganyco.gov/wp-content/uploads/AlmondCompPlanForPublicHearingSeptember2018compressed.pdf
William G. Pomeroy Foundation. “A Hairy Legend.” 2018. Accessed August 1, 2026. https://www.wgpfoundation.org/historic-markers/a-hairy-legend/
William G. Pomeroy Foundation. “List of Pomeroy Foundation Markers and Plaques.” 2021. https://www.wgpfoundation.org/app/uploads/2021/05/Snap-That-Sign-2021-Marker-List.pdf
William G. Pomeroy Foundation. “What Qualifies as an Accepted Source?” Accessed August 1, 2026. https://www.wgpfoundation.org/history/legends-lore/sources/
Willis, Jasmine. “A ‘Hairy Legend’ Lives On.” Evening Tribune, August 21, 2018. https://www.eveningtribune.com/news/20180821/hairy-legend-lives-on
Author Note: The Hairy Women of Klipnocky remain one of the most distinctive legends found in Appalachian New York, although their exact origins are uncertain. This article separates the documented history of Klipnocky and Canaseraga from the folklore that generations of local residents have preserved.