Appalachian Folklore & Myths – The Wampus Cat of Appalachia: Catawampus Critters, Cherokee Masks, and Mountain Memory
On a cold mountain night it does not take much to start a story. A house cat yowls in the yard. Something screams once down in the hollow. A bucket tips over on the porch. Before long somebody shakes their head and says that the wampus cat is out again.
Across Appalachia that name covers a whole menagerie of fears. Sometimes the wampus cat is a half dog, half cat thing that howls on the ridge and steals livestock. Sometimes it is a six legged cougar mascot with four legs to run and two to fight. Sometimes it is a Cherokee woman, wrapped in a cat skin and cursed to roam the woods forever.
If you start digging through dialect books, old newspapers, and folklore collections, a pattern emerges. The Appalachian wampus cat that haunts ghost tours and Cherokee themed legends today is not a single ancient story. It is the product of more than a century of overlapping traditions that began with a strange little word in American dialect, wandered through lumberjack tall tales and southern newspapers, and eventually settled in the mountains as both a monster and a symbol.
What follows is an attempt to trace that history, from “catawampus” in the nineteenth century to the Cherokee cat spirit of modern Appalachian lore.
Catawampus, Cattywampus, and the First Printed Wampus Cats
Long before anyone wrote about a Cherokee woman turned into a cat, American speakers were already throwing around the word catawampus. Nineteenth century dictionaries and dialect collectors used it in several ways. Sometimes it meant something placed crooked or “cater cornered.” Sometimes it meant something that had gone wrong. And sometimes it referred to a wild, imaginary beast.
The Oxford English Dictionary eventually summarized one strand of this usage by defining “catawumpus” or “cata wumpus” as nineteenth century American slang for “a bogy, a fierce imaginary animal.” That definition already sounds like a cousin of the modern wampus cat.
Dialect collectors for the American Dialect Society went a step further. In the early volumes of Dialect Notes they recorded phrases such as “catawampus (or wampus) cat,” sometimes glossed simply as an imaginary animal and sometimes as a human insult. A later volume gave the explicit definition “Catawampus (or wampus) cat, n. phr. A virago. ‘She’s a regular catawampus cat.’” In other words, catawampus cat could mean a fierce, domineering woman as easily as it could mean a vague monster lurking in the dark.
Modern summaries of the dialect work note that these meanings were especially common in North Carolina and the broader Southeast and that they overlapped with regional words for the cougar or catamount. As big cats disappeared from the southern mountains, the word that once pointed toward a very real predator loosened and drifted. Somewhere in the early twentieth century the syllables flipped. Catawampus became wampus, and “wampus cat” began to appear in print.
By the time folklorists circled back around in the mid twentieth century, the American Dialect Society’s notes on “wampus cat” described it as “a creature heard whining about camps at night,” “a spiritual green eyed cat, having occult powers,” and “an undefined imaginary animal.” None of those quotes mention Cherokee stories or six legs. They are simply shorthand for something strange in the dark.
Fearsome Critters and Amphibious Panthers
While dialect collectors were filing index cards, another tradition was giving the wampus cat a completely different body. In lumber camps across the northern woods, loggers delighted in stories of “fearsome critters,” a whole catalogue of invented animals used to haze greenhorns and pass long nights.
In 1939 Henry H. Tryon published Fearsome Critters, a humorous little book that gathered those tales into mock scientific form. Among them was the wampus cat of Idaho, described as a bipedal cat about the size of a Maine coon with tufted ears, the tail of a lion, a comical grin, and an “amazing right forearm” that worked like a folding pruning hook “on the pantographic principle.” Tryon even gave it a fake Latin name, Aquilamappreluendens forcipe, as if it were a real creature in a zoological catalogue.
A few years later the Ozark folklorist Vance Randolph offered his own take. In We Always Lie to Strangers, his 1951 collection of Ozark tall tales, he mentioned the wampus as “a kind of amphibious panther which leaps into the water and swims like a colossal mink.” Randolph’s wampus prowled river bottoms as comfortably as ridges, another way of expressing the old frontier fear of predators that could strike from any direction.
Neither of these versions had anything to do with Cherokee women or the southern Appalachians in particular. Tryon’s Idaho prank beast and Randolph’s Ozark water panther both belonged to a wider American pattern in which hunters and workers imagined slightly exaggerated versions of the most dangerous animals around them. In this strand of the tradition the wampus cat is a joke, a tall tale, or a way to talk about panthers long after real cougars had vanished from many eastern woods.
Wampus Cats in the Papers
If Tryon and Randolph make the wampus cat sound like something out of the camp bunkhouse, the newspapers of the early twentieth century show how quickly that same name turned serious whenever livestock died or strange things cried in the night.
Atlas Obscura’s recent essay on the creature walks through a string of early clippings from around 1900 onward. In Fort Smith, Arkansas, “wampus cat” appeared as an epithet for a local ne’er do well. Near Houston it became the name of an amateur baseball team. Around Flagstaff, Arizona, it was slapped on a notorious bucking horse. All of those uses treated “wampus cat” as shorthand for rowdiness and wildness, not as a literal monster.
Other articles drifted toward cryptid territory. One Sherman, Texas, story around the turn of the century described “the great Wampus cat” as “the specter of some huge bobcat of past ages” seen on semi moonlit summer nights along the Oklahoma border. A 1913 Mississippi report blamed a wampus cat for dog skeletons left behind in the wake of a flood. In Arkadelphia, Arkansas, a caged animal exhibited in town in 1914 was grandly announced as the original Wampus Cat, “more savage than a lion,” with a nine foot tail and mixed bear, badger, and deer features.
In the southern mountains the name took on a similar role. A HowStuffWorks survey of the legend points to a Greeneville Sun item from 1918 that reported a “wampus” roaming a ridge near a Tennessee community and to later papers that blamed a wampus for a string of livestock deaths near Norfolk. MythosJourney notes that by the 1930s newspapers in the Piedmont of North Carolina were invoking the wampus cat whenever cattle, pigs, or dogs turned up dead under mysterious circumstances.
By mid century the name could stir a full blown monster scare. In the spring of 1964 residents around Dean’s Crossroads in Johnston County, North Carolina, began reporting an eight foot tall ape like creature in the woods along the Neuse River. The Goldsboro News Argus dubbed the beast a “Wampus Cat,” and the label stuck. Hundreds of people poured into the countryside with guns and flashlights until the sheriff finally shut the hunt down as a hoax and a danger to public safety.
Whether the culprit was a bobcat, a loose dog, or nothing at all, the pattern remained the same. When people heard something screaming in the woods or woke to find a dead mule, the wampus cat offered a ready name for whatever was out there.
Cherokee Women, Booger Masks, and Modern Legend
The piece that most people now associate with the Appalachian wampus cat entered print surprisingly late. In many modern tellings the creature is not simply an undefined beast but a Cherokee woman transformed into a cat spirit after breaking a taboo. That story has become so common that it is often presented as timeless Cherokee tradition, yet the written record suggests that it crystallized only in the late twentieth century.
One influential version appears on AppalachianHistory.net in an article by Dave Tabler. There the wampus cat is tied explicitly to a Cherokee demon called Ew’ah, the Spirit of Madness, who has been tormenting a village. Warriors fail to defeat the demon. Running Deer, the wife of a brave driven mad by Ew’ah, takes matters into her own hands. With the help of shamans she dons a bobcat mask, covers herself in black paste to hide her scent, and ambushes the demon by a mountain stream. The reflected cat spirit turns Ew’ah’s power back on itself, and the demon tears itself apart. Running Deer returns home as Spirit Talker and Home Protector, and some tellers say that her spirit lives on as the Wampas Cat, guarding the land.
Tabler’s notes credit this version to a 2003 telling preserved on an online horror forum, combined with material from Charles Edwin Price’s Mysterious Knoxville, S. E. Schlosser’s AmericanFolklore.net story “The Wampus Cat,” and background about booger masks and the Ewah from the Moonlit Road’s “Wampas Mask” feature. Taken together, those sources braid Cherokee ritual details, a modern invented demon, and the older phrase “wampus cat” into a single narrative.
North Carolina Ghosts offers a related but more cautious story. Its Wampus Cat begins as a Cherokee woman who wraps herself in a cougar skin to spy on forbidden male hunting rites. Caught by the sorcerer, she is cursed so that the cougar skin becomes her own skin and she is doomed to wander the hills as a human feline hybrid. In a separate “More About this Story” section, the site stresses that this is a story told about the Cherokee rather than a tale documented from Cherokee oral tradition and that the word “catawampus” predates any of these versions.
Recent overviews echo that caution. HowStuffWorks presents both a Running Deer style demon slayer and a “curiosity killed the cat” version in which a woman spies on a sacred ceremony, then notes that concrete links to historic Cherokee storytelling are hard to trace. Essays from Cherokee and Native affiliated writers sometimes embrace the wampus cat as a way to talk about booger masks, shape shifting, and the dangers of breaking ritual law, while others frame the legend as a non Native distortion of Cherokee imagery.
From a historian’s angle it is safest to say that the Cherokee woman narrative is a modern synthesis. It draws on genuine Cherokee practices, especially masked winter dances and beliefs about powerful animal spirits, but the specific story of Running Deer or the spying wife cannot be firmly documented before the late twentieth century. The wampus cat that prowls those pages is a creature of paperback folklore collections, ghost tour scripts, and internet storytelling as much as of any nineteenth century council house.
Wampus Cats in the Carolinas and East Tennessee
If the Cherokee framed story gives the wampus cat a mythic origin, North Carolina and East Tennessee communities have given it specific haunts.
In the Piedmont around Lake Norman, historian O. C. “Chris” Stonestreet gathered memories of a mysterious livestock killer that locals called the Wampus. His later book Curse of the Wampus and Other Short Spooky Stories of Piedmont North Carolina collects those accounts, which describe a creature somewhere between a dog and a colt, sometimes silver, sometimes black, with odd tracks and blazing eyes. Newspaper research he shared in a Lake Norman legends column shows references to a catlike animal killing livestock in Iredell County as early as the 1890s, suggesting that the wampus label attached itself to an already long running pattern of mystery predators.
In East Tennessee, Charles Edwin Price tells of a Wampus or Wampas Cat near Knoxville, blending elements of the Cherokee woman legend with more general mountain ghost motifs. In some versions the creature is a cat woman apparition that appears along wooded roads and riverbanks. In others it is simply the noise people hear when they are nervous in the dark. Price’s collections help show how a relatively modern printed lore cycle can sink into local storytelling and feel ancient within a generation or two.
Journalists in western North Carolina have noticed the way that “wampus cat” continues to resurface whenever people talk about strange things in the hills. A 2025 Strangeville feature from Asheville’s 828 News Now revisits the 1964 Goldsboro flap and traces later sightings, art, and tourist references that keep the creature alive as a kind of symbol for the mountain South, “part myth, part reflection of the people who told it.”
Taken together, these Carolina and Tennessee stories show the wampus cat at work in everyday life. It is the thing that might be killing your neighbor’s chickens, the name schoolchildren whisper on a dark hike, and the subject of regional Halloween features that mix archival clippings with campfire gossip.
Mascots, Patches, and Six Legged Cats
By the time the twentieth century wore on, the wampus cat had jumped from the woods to the ball field.
In 1922 Conway High School in Arkansas adopted the Wampus Cats as its mascot. According to the district’s own history, their wampus is a large mountain lion like creature with six legs, “four to run at the speed of light, and two to fight with all its might.” A bronze statue of the six legged cat stands outside the school, and the image appears on everything from letter jackets to city branding.
Conway is not alone. A cluster of schools across the South and West have embraced the wampus cat as a mascot, including Atoka High in Oklahoma, Itasca High in Texas, Clark Fork Junior Senior High in Idaho, and Leesville High in Louisiana. Local histories for these schools often present their wampus as a fierce guardian of the community, sometimes with six legs, sometimes simply as a mean looking big cat.
Sports writers and rural journalists have had fun with the idea. A widely cited Daily Yonder article from 2008, “Reporters Looking for Stories, Finding Wampus Cats,” profiles Conway and other wampus schools as examples of small town creativity in mascots, contrasting them with the more generic panthers and eagles that dominate high school nicknames.
On a smaller scale, scout troops and local organizations have used wampus cat patches and badges to mark spooky campouts, often drawing directly on the Goldsboro or Piedmont North Carolina stories. The beast that once frightened children back into the house at dusk now grins from water bottles and hoodies, its claws blunted by nostalgia.
What Kind of Creature Is the Appalachian Wampus Cat
So after all of that, what exactly is the wampus cat in Appalachian tradition.
If you line up the sources, several overlapping shapes appear. The oldest printed traces show catawampus and wampus cat as slang for something crooked, for an undefined bogey, or for a fierce woman who refuses to be quiet. Lumberjack and Ozark tall tales imagine a comical or terrifying cat with absurd physical traits, sometimes able to swim like a colossal mink, sometimes brandishing a folding, hook shaped forearm. Early twentieth century newspapers in Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and the Carolinas use the name whenever something is killing dogs and livestock or when an unexplained howl ripples across the dark.
Only later do we see the distinct Cherokee woman narrative solidify, first in print collections and then in online retellings that emphasize Running Deer, Ew’ah, and the forbidden ceremony. That story has power. It wraps gender, curiosity, and punishment into a single vivid image and it gives Appalachia a cat spirit who walks the boundary between human and animal worlds. At the same time, Cherokee and non Cherokee scholars alike remind us that this version is a modern composite. It can enrich conversations about Cherokee culture if handled carefully, but it should not be mistaken for a simple survival of pre Removal oral tradition.
In the lived experience of mountain communities, the wampus cat is less a fixed monster than a flexible label. It is what you blame when the henhouse is a mess and nothing else quite fits. It is the thing your grandmother invoked when she wanted you off the creek bank before dark. It is the six legged cat statue students paint before homecoming and the cryptid that tourism brochures mention when they want to spice up a list of hiking trails.
Looking at the wampus cat in this way tells us more about people than about cats. It shows how a stray dialect word can accumulate meanings as it travels from region to region. It shows how newspaper editors reach for colorful labels when they need a headline for yet another dog killing and how those labels can, in turn, feed back into oral tradition. It shows how Native imagery and ritual ideas can be borrowed, adapted, and sometimes distorted as non Native writers look for a deeper origin story for a creature whose earliest printed life had nothing to do with the Cherokee at all.
Most of all, the wampus cat reveals how communities across Appalachia and the broader South have used monsters to think about very real fears. The extinction of the cougar left a predator shaped hole in regional memory that words like catawampus and wampus helped to fill. The dangers of night travel on narrow mountain roads, the vulnerability of livestock, and the sense that some parts of the woods never quite belong to humans all find their way into wampus stories.
Some nights it is easier to say that a wampus cat walked through the yard than to list every natural explanation. The name carries a century of dread, humor, and local pride.
Sources and Further Reading
American Dialect Society. Dialect Notes. Vol. 3. New Haven, CT: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, 1913. https://www.americandialect.org
Ballard, Shannon. “Strangeville: The Enduring Mystery of the Wampus Cat.” 828 News Now, November 30, 2025. https://828newsnow.com/news/228822-strangeville-the-enduring-mystery-of-the-wampus-cat
Bowie, Desiree. “The Wampus Cat Myth Explained: Origins and Sightings.” HowStuffWorks, 2025. https://history.howstuffworks.com/myths-legends/wampus-cat.htm
Coppedge, Clay. “Catch a Wampus Cat.” Texas Co-op Power, August 2024. https://texascooppower.com/catch-a-wampus-cat
Griffith, Nancy. “Lake Norman Legends: The Wampus.” News of Davidson, May 2, 2024. https://newsofdavidson.org/2024/05/02/73249/lake-norman-legends-the-wampus
Lumberwoods. “Fearsome Critters Library (Wampus Cat entry).” Lumberwoods: The Fearsome Critters Archive, n.d. https://lumberwoods.org
MythosJourney. “Wampus Cat.” MythosJourney, n.d. https://mythosjourney.com
Price, Charles Edwin. Mysterious Knoxville. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 1999. Available via WorldCat. https://www.worldcat.org
Randolph, Vance. We Always Lie to Strangers: Tall Tales from the Ozarks. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951. https://www.columbiauniversitypress.com
Schlosser, S. E. “The Wampus Cat.” American Folklore, 2010. https://www.americanfolklore.net/folklore/2010/08/the_wampus_cat.html
Stonestreet, O. C., IV. Curse of the Wampus, and Other Short Spooky Stories of Piedmont North Carolina. North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016. https://www.amazon.com/Wampus-Spooky-Stories-Piedmont-Carolina/dp/152323749X
Tabler, Dave. “The Story of the Wampus Cat.” Appalachian History, October 13, 2017. https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2017/10/story-of-wampus-cat.html
Tryon, Henry H. Fearsome Critters. Idlewild Press, 1939. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fearsome_critters
White, April. “The Child-Eating Wampus Cat Prowling the American South.” Atlas Obscura, May 3, 2024. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/wampus-cat
“The Wampus Cat.” North Carolina Ghosts, n.d. https://northcarolinaghosts.com/mountains/the-wampus-cat
“Wampus Cat.” Wikipedia, last modified 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampus_catPower+3conwaywampuscats.com+3Roadside America+3
Author Note: I first met the wampus cat in dialect notes, Cherokee discussions, and yellowed newspaper clippings rather than on a ghost tour. My hope is that this piece lets you hear its yowl as a story about language, fear, and who gets to tell mountain legends.