Appalachian Folklore & Myths
On a foggy night in the southern coalfields, the woods around Boone County can feel crowded even when you are alone. There is the constant drip of water off the highwalls, the clatter of loose slate, the smell of old coal smoke still clinging to siding and jackets. Deer slide through the timber. Stray dogs work the hollows. Every headlamp catches eyeshine.
Since the mid 1990s, hunters and motorists in this country have told another kind of story. They speak of a huge white animal that tears out of the brush, rank with a sulfur smell, big as a bear yet shaped wrong for any ordinary creature. Sometimes it drops to all fours and charges. Sometimes it rears, almost upright, its horns and claws catching the light.
Locals gave it a name that sounds half joke and half warning: Sheepsquatch. Others reach for an older term that shows up all through West Virginia storytelling. They call it the White Thing.
What follows is not an attempt to prove that anything monstrous roams Boone County. Instead it is a look at how a strange Kanawha County fox-hunters’ tale collected in the 1950s turned into a coalfield cryptid tied to Boone County in the 1990s, and how White Things as a class of Appalachian beasts have become part of the way the Mountain State talks about its wild places.
A fox-hunters’ fire and the first White Thing on paper
The earliest detailed White Thing story we can trace in print comes from a student term paper. In 1954, a Kanawha County native named Thomas A. Burford submitted a typed folktale called “The White Thing” for Dr. Ruth Ann Musick’s folklore course at Fairmont State. Musick later noted that Burford considered the tale “common in Kanawha County,” which suggests he was writing down something already well known among older storytellers rather than inventing a new monster.
Burford’s version, now preserved in the Musick papers at the Frank and Jane Gabor West Virginia Folklife Center, sets the scene among four elderly fox hunters sitting around a fire as their talk drifts toward local haints. One man repeats a story from his grandmother, who was riding home from church when something erupted from the timber beside the road. In his account the creature is a four-footed, pure white beast, larger than a dog yet not quite horse-sized, with a gaping mouth of razor teeth and a shriek like a woman in agony. By the next morning, the woman’s mare is found dead, almost stripped of flesh outside the barn.
Musick chose to reprint this tale in her 1965 collection The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales, placing it in a short “Strange Beasts” section that also includes stories of other inexplicable creatures. She struggled to classify these entities, writing that they were not quite ordinary ghosts or revenants, but “malevolent supernatural manifestations of another order,” a phrase that still shapes how writers talk about White Things today.
Taken together, Burford’s paper and Musick’s book give us the first fixed description of a West Virginia White Thing in the historical record. The Musick papers preserve the original student typescript with Burford’s name, while The Telltale Lilac Bush carries the story into popular circulation across the state.
From Kanawha hills to a whole family of White Things
Once the Burford story entered print, it became a touchstone for later writers and researchers. A 2025 feature in West Virginia Explorer on “the Kanawha County monster” explicitly points back to Burford’s 1954 submission and Musick’s 1965 book as the earliest known documentation of a creature called the White Thing in state folklore.
By the late twentieth century, folklorists and paranormal writers were no longer treating the White Thing as a single Kanawha County monster. They began to talk instead about White Things in the plural. Rosemary Ellen Guiley’s Monsters of West Virginia gathers accounts of “white creatures” that mountain people describe as wolves, bears, cows, or even huge badgers, all covered in long shaggy white hair and gifted with outsized jaws and fangs.
Cryptid encyclopedias and online bestiaries built on Guiley’s work, treating White Things or “White Devils” as a class of Appalachian phantom beasts. These sources describe entities that may appear canine, feline, or vaguely human, but they almost always share a few core traits: stark white hair, glaring eyes, claws, and a scream more like a person in distress than an animal.
Popular outlets aimed at travelers and curiosity seekers, such as an OnlyInYourState essay on “the White Devils of West Virginia,” add another detail that ties the modern stories back to the older Musick material. In their retellings, White Things sometimes maul livestock or chase people, yet their victims report no wounds afterward, only terror. The creatures show up near remote graveyards, lonely roadcuts, or the edges of reclaimed industrial ground and are sometimes spoken of as omens of death.
Across these retellings, Burford’s White Thing is no longer alone. It has become part of a larger set of white beasts that haunt the woods from Mason and Kanawha counties to more distant corners of the state.
Coal, immigrants, and White Things in the northern fields
This broader pattern comes into sharper focus when we step away from Kanawha County and look north to Morgan’s Ridge in Marion and Monongalia Counties. A Clio public history entry on a “White Thing/Sheepsquatch Sighting” along Morgan’s Ridge stitches together twentieth-century monster reports with the area’s coal history. It notes that this ridge line sits inside the old Fairmont coal field. Commercial coal mining there began in the early 1850s, and by the turn of the twentieth century Fairmont had become a leading coal producer in the new state. Mines along the ridge drew immigrants from Italy, Poland, Hungary, and other European countries who brought their own ghost stories into the West Virginia hills.
According to that entry, a cluster of sightings through the 1900s described a white beast that prowled near mines and company towns, an apparition locals sometimes called the White Thing and sometimes Sheepsquatch. The Clio authors frame the monster as part of the way residents made sense of dangerous industrial landscapes and the uncertainties of immigrant life in the coalfields.
This Morgan’s Ridge material does not directly involve Boone County, but it shows that long before the 1990s, West Virginians were already using the White Thing label for strange creatures glimpsed in coal country.
Sheepsquatch is born: Boone County in the 1990s
The version of the beast that Boone County is now famous for, the horned, woolly cryptid named Sheepsquatch, does not appear in print until the late twentieth century. Here again, Musick’s old White Thing lurks in the background.
A 2004 article at West Virginia Ghosts by researcher Ed Rollins may be the closest thing we have to a near-primary source for the modern Sheepsquatch wave. Rollins describes his own encounter with a brownish-white creature near the old TNT area at Point Pleasant. The animal moved on all fours to drink from a creek and, in his description, had a long canine head, single-point horns, and paw-like hands. He emphasizes a sulfuric smell, which he connects to chemical runoff from wartime munitions works.
After telling his personal story, Rollins offers a concise definition of the creature that ties his experience back to Musick’s Kanawha County lore. He describes Sheepsquatch as a long-haired, carnivorous quadruped roaming the hills of western West Virginia and notes that “the creature, and perhaps others like it, was first documented” by Musick in The Telltale Lilac Bush, with the original account originating in Kanawha County. He then points out that more recent sightings cluster in Boone, Putnam, and Mason Counties and observes that reports from Boone surged in the mid 1990s.
Modern reference works echo this summary. The Sheepsquatch entry in West Virginia folklore on Wikipedia, drawing on Rollins and a WBOY “Paranormal W.Va” segment, describes the creature as a large, woolly, sheep-like being with horns, fangs, and clawed hands. It locates Sheepsquatch specifically in Boone County and credits Musick’s 1965 White Thing story as the folkloric ancestor of the cryptid.
A 2018 article at Brickthology, a long-running cryptid blog, goes further and treats “Sheepsquatch or White Thing” as two names for what is probably the same entity. The author notes that the creature first enters American folklore through Musick’s 1965 book and argues that as the White Thing’s popularity grew, people began calling it Sheepsquatch because they needed a label that better matched an impossible hybrid of sheep and Sasquatch.
What witnesses say in Boone County
When you lay these sources side by side, the Boone County Sheepsquatch accounts share a consistent core.
A statewide feature in WV News, “Cryptids of West Virginia: from Mothman to Ogua and beyond,” summarizes Sheepsquatch as a woolly, horned beast, also known as the White Thing, reported in Boone, Kanawha, and Mason Counties. The writer emphasizes that sightings begin in the mid 1990s and describes the creature as a large, bear-like animal with a sheep-like appearance, sharp teeth, and a “musky” odor.
The Brickthology profile adds more detail from various reports. In that account, Sheepsquatch is often described as having dog-like features, long shaggy white or dirty-white hair, goat-like horns, a large fanged mouth, and front limbs that end in paw-like hands similar to a raccoon’s. Witnesses sometimes mention a long, ringed tail and the animal’s ability to move on both two and four legs, covering ground at “lightning” speed while screaming in a way that people compare to a woman’s voice.
Taken together with Rollins’s piece at West Virginia Ghosts, a rough Boone County timeline emerges, even if individual witnesses are not always named. By the middle of the 1990s, stories circulate of the following:
A former Navy seaman or outdoorsman encounters a huge white creature drinking at a creek and is driven off by its smell and size.
Children in Boone County see a white, bear-like animal in their yard that rises up on its hind legs before crashing away into the timber.
A couple driving a rural road spots a hulking white beast in a roadside ditch and reports that it charges their vehicle, leaving them shaken.
Campers or hunters describe a massive white animal that circles their campsite, screams, and charges, accompanied by a strong sulfur or “chemical” odor, then disappears without leaving clear tracks or wounds.
None of these episodes appear in nineteenth-century newspapers or court records. They live in interviews, web forums, and cryptid compilations. Yet they cluster tightly around Boone County and the surrounding coalfields, and nearly every retelling ties them back to Musick’s White Thing account in Kanawha County. In that sense, Boone’s Sheepsquatch stories are both modern and deeply rooted.
Coalfield woods and a monster of mixed ancestry
What makes Boone County such fertile ground for a monster that is part sheep, part Sasquatch, and part ghost dog from a 1950s fox-hunters’ tale?
One answer lies in landscape. Boone sits in the southern part of the state, where strip mines, deep mines, and logging operations have carved a patchwork of reclaimed cuts, second-growth woods, and narrow hollows. It is easy to imagine a large white animal slipping in and out of these broken spaces, whether it is a misidentified bear, a feral farm animal, or something stranger.
The Morgan’s Ridge Clio entry makes a similar point about the northern coalfields. There, White Thing and Sheepsquatch sightings cluster around an early industrial district of mines and immigrant housing, places where the earth itself was being ripped open for coal and where danger was a daily reality.
In both regions, White Thing stories become a way to talk about the hazards and uncertainties of coal country. The beast rips a horse to pieces on a lonely Kanawha road, roams a TNT-scarred landscape near Point Pleasant, or stalks campers in Boone County hollows where the woods have grown back over sealed portals. The sulfur smell that witnesses describe in Boone fits neatly into this pattern, echoing real pollution from explosives works and mine runoff as much as it suggests brimstone from some other world.
Folklorists also note that White Things belong to a larger set of “devil dog” tales that appear on both sides of the Atlantic, from British black dogs to Appalachian “snarly yows.” Guiley’s work and later syntheses on cryptid wiki point out that in the West Virginia versions, the beasts are often omens of death or disaster, especially when they appear on remote roads or near cemeteries.
In that sense, calling the Boone County creature a White Thing ties it into a folk language that long predates the television-friendly label Sheepsquatch.
From folklore student to TV monster
If Musick and Burford represent the quiet, typewritten beginning of the White Thing tradition, cable television represents its loudest modern amplification.
Reality shows like Mountain Monsters have devoted whole episodes to hunting a “Sheepsquatch of Boone County,” complete with glowing eyes, thermal cameras, and dramatic night-vision pursuits. Pop-cryptid videos and podcasts bill it as the “Boone County Beast,” often cherry-picking details from Rollins’s article, Brickthology, and similar online sources before spinning them into elaborate hunts and origin theories.
Tourism outlets have taken notice. A road-trip feature from the state tourism office’s cryptid guide invites travelers to “pay these West Virginia cryptids a visit,” including Sheepsquatch, which it places along the same Point Pleasant and Charleston corridor that Rollins explored. Sightings from the mid 1990s are boiled down into a brief description of a large, woolly white creature with a dog-like head and ram horns said to lurk around the old TNT area.
The WV News cryptids article likewise lists Sheepsquatch alongside Mothman, the Flatwoods Monster, and the Grafton Monster, framing all of them as not only frightening stories but drivers of festivals, museums, and roadside attractions.
That evolution tells us something important about the life of a story. In 1954, a single student wrote down his grandmother’s account of a white beast on a Kanawha County road. In 1965, a folklorist used that tale to think through new categories for Appalachian ghost stories. By the 1990s, people in Boone County and beyond were describing their own encounters with a white, horned animal in coalfield woods. By the 2010s and 2020s, the Sheepsquatch had become a marketable figure on T-shirts, mini-golf courses, and TV hunts.
The creature may or may not exist in flesh and blood, but it undeniably exists in the cultural landscape, especially in Boone County where the label White Thing has begun to share space with Sheepsquatch on paranormal tour flyers and small-press books about haunted hollows.
Reading the White Thing today
For historians and folklorists, White Things and Sheepsquatch raise a set of questions that go far beyond animal identification.
First, they highlight how quickly a local tale can migrate from oral tradition to the archive, then into mass media. Without Burford’s decision to type up his Kanawha County story for class, Musick might never have included “The White Thing” in The Telltale Lilac Bush. Without that book, later writers like Rollins, Guiley, and the WV Ghosts editors would have lacked a clear anchor when they began to hear about white beasts in Boone and Mason counties.
Second, they show how certain images stick. Burford’s White Thing screams like a woman and kills a horse without ever fully revealing what it wants. Later accounts of Sheepsquatch repeat the scream, the ambiguity, and the puzzling lack of physical evidence after supposed attacks. Only the setting shifts, from fox-hunters’ campfires and barnlots to ATV trails and reclaimed strip benches.
Finally, they remind us that in coalfield communities, the line between the natural and the supernatural has long been blurred. Collapse, explosion, suffocation, and sudden disaster are facts of life in these hills. It is no surprise that storytellers sometimes imagine those forces taking on the shape of a white beast that tears through the dark and leaves people shaken and alive but unable to prove what they saw.
Standing on a Boone County ridge at night, with the wind in the treetops and the spoil banks falling away below, it is easy to understand why some folks say they still feel watched. Whether that watcher is a misidentified bear, a tale shared around a campfire, or something like Musick’s “malevolent manifestations of another order” is, in the end, part of what makes the White Thing so enduring.
Sources and further reading
Ruth Ann Musick, The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales. University Press of Kentucky, 1965. See especially the “Strange Beasts” section, which includes “The White Thing,” originally collected from Thomas A. Burford of Kanawha County and now preserved in the Musick papers at Fairmont State University. West Virginia Explorer+1
Frank and Jane Gabor West Virginia Folklife Center, Fairmont State University, “Ruth Ann Musick Collection” finding aid. Box 52 lists a typed folktale “The White Thing” by Thomas A. Burford, the earliest known archival copy of the story later printed in The Telltale Lilac Bush. fairmontstate.edu
David Sibray, “Tale of Kanawha County monster may have first been documented in 1950s,” West Virginia Explorer, May 26, 2025. This article reproduces Burford’s White Thing story and discusses Musick’s interpretation of such creatures as “malevolent supernatural manifestations of another order.” West Virginia Explorer
Ed Rollins, “Sheepsquatch,” West Virginia Ghosts, October 14, 2004. Rollins recounts his own sighting near the TNT area and offers a concise definition of Sheepsquatch that links modern reports in Boone, Putnam, and Mason Counties back to Musick’s Kanawha County White Thing. West Virginia Ghosts
“White Things (Devil Dogs),” Cryptid Wiki. Summarizes Rosemary Ellen Guiley’s discussion of White Things in Monsters of West Virginia and treats them as a family of shaggy white beasts that includes Sheepsquatch. Cryptid Wiki+1
“Cryptids of West Virginia: from Mothman to Ogua and beyond,” WV News, March 28, 2025. Places Sheepsquatch, “also known as the White Thing,” among the state’s key cryptids and notes reports from Boone, Kanawha, and Mason Counties beginning in the mid 1990s. WV News
“Sheepsquatch,” Brickthology, October 7, 2018. A cryptid profile that explicitly treats Sheepsquatch and the White Thing as closely related and traces the figure’s first appearance in print to Musick’s 1965 collection. Brickthology+1
“White Thing/Sheepsquatch Sighting,” Clio entry and associated “West Virginia Cryptids Tour.” Uses White Thing and Sheepsquatch reports along Morgan’s Ridge in Marion and Monongalia Counties to explore the connection between coalfield development, immigrant communities, and monster lore. Clio+1
Cristy Carr, “The Legends Of The White Devils Of West Virginia May Send Chills Down Your Spine,” OnlyInYourState, December 27, 2021. A travel-oriented but detailed summary of White Things, Devil Dogs, and Sheepsquatch in West Virginia, emphasizing their presence in remote woods and cemeteries and their role as omens in local storytelling. Only In Your State