What Fresh Hell is a Wampus Cat? | Opinion

Photo byPriscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦onUnsplash

Something you don't want to run into in a dark alley, that's for sure.

I’ve heard it said that the Wampus Cat is a creature that you rarely see and live to tell the tale.

A man I knew went hunting one night. We live in raccoon country, so it’s not all that unusual for people to go hunting at night. He took his dogs and struck out into the woods of East Texas. He’d managed to bag a raccoon or two, and was having an all right evening, considering. At least until his dogs got nervous.

Suddenly, out there in the woods, miles from civilization — such as it is out here, anyway — his dogs began to whimper and fidget. These dogs were pretty well-known locally for their bravery. Not much scared these dogs. One of them, Red, had stared down a bear to protect this man. But tonight — well, that was something else.

The whimpering turned to barking, and both of his dogs came free of their leash and flew off into the woods, toward his home. Leaving my friend alone in the dark.

Well, not exactly alone.

He heard a fierce howl behind him. I’ve asked him to describe it, but he doesn’t care to remember it. The closest he came was saying it sounded like the fires of Hell itself — a terrible, screaming wail.

He spun around, rifle at the ready — and he promptly dropped the rifle. What he saw was terror itself. A hulking, black beast of a cat — the size of at least two mountain lions. Its eyes shone bright green in the darkness, and he could feel its breath coming hot from behind wicked fangs. So, he did what any red-blooded Texan would do.

He screamed like a little girl, spun around, and tore off into the woods.

The man heard a powerful thump, thump, thump padding after him, and he made it to his house just in time to make it inside and slam the door — welcomed by his dogs — before the Wampus Cat made it inside with him.

Ask five people, and you’ll get five different answers about what a Wampus Cat is. The Cherokee say it was once a beautiful woman. She was a strong, powerful woman — she could outrun a deer without breaking a sweat, and no man dared raising a hand to her. But, the men of her tribe refused to let her go hunting. It wasn’t done, they said, and a woman needed to stay where it was safe.

Having none of that, she went off into the woods one night.

Her husband had gone ahead, part of a hunting party, and she followed him. At last, she found where her husband and the other men made camp. They sat around, telling each other stories of their people, of the hunt. The tribe’s medicine man had come along, and he told sacred stories and performed rituals to aid them on the hunt.

Under the laws of her tribe, it was forbidden for women to hear the tribe’s sacred stories and see the old magic done. Wrapped in a cloak made from the skin of a mountain lion, she became afraid. She attempted to get away, but the noise alerted the medicine man. With a great fury, he cursed the woman — binding her to the great cat’s skin. She became the first Wampus cat — half-woman, and half-lioness, doomed to roam the forests and hills, howling in anger and sadness, unable to return to her body.

Nearly everywhere in America, you can find stories of the Wampus Cat, and they come in different froms. From the traditional Cherokee tale to more fanciful things.

In the Appalachias, legend has it that the Wampus Cat has arms that it can extend, like a folding coathanger — to reach up and grab an eagle right out of the sky for dinner.

In the Southwest, the Wampus Cat is a huge, black panther that lives alone, hunts quietly, kills suddenly and viciously; and celebrates its hunt by its distinctive screaming howl.

If y’all caught on to the fact that this, like the story of the hoop snake, is a little bit of a tall tale, well — you’re a sharp one.

But, like the hoop snake, the Wampus Cat has been with Americans — Native and otherwise — for a very long time. It was born among the Cherokee, and the above isn’t the only legend of this cryptic critter.

Another version of the legend says the woman, following her husband on a hunt, found that her husband had run into trouble. That he’d been driven to near-madness by the evil spirit Ew'ah — the hideous, pure embodiment of madness — and had found himself cornered by the minions of Ew’ah. The woman, named Running Deer, wrapped herself in her mountain lion cloak and donned a booger mask, calling on the spirits for aid. The spirits answered — transforming her into a great mountain lion, with the strength of a pack of the big cats, and she singlehandedly defeated the demon’s minions — and Ew’ah himself — saving her husband. They returned home to their village, and her husband, now freed of madness, recounted the battle. She became the tribe’s Spirit-Talker and Home-Protector, champion of the spirits.

On her death, she asked only that her spirit be returned to the same body she’d used to protect her husband, that she might forever defend the land from anything that would threaten it. And in this version too — she became the Wampus Cat.

Other interpretations (by White settlers) mixed the tale with their own superstitious traditions, tying it into witchcraft and shapeshifters from European myths and folklore. In the western Appalachias, where Scandinavian people settled, the Wampus Cat is a powerful trickster, cunning as it is powerful. It evokes a lineage of two of the Norse gods — Odin and Loki.

In other places, the folklore merged with those who remembered the witch trials of the Old Country and New England. The Wampus Cat became a woman punished for practicing witchcraft, or tricked by the Devil himself into becoming it.

Margaret R. Tryon's 1939 depiction of the Wampus cat catching an eagle.Photo byWikimedia Commons

The What-pus Cat?

It has a lot of names — from the Gallywampus, to the Whistlin’ Wampus, to — as it tends to be here in Northeast Texas, just the plain, old Wampus Cat.

It’s been with us so long, it’s passed into the American cultural memory. Once, in the 1920s, “sightings,” of the Wampus Cat, tied to an animal killing livestock, made it into newspapers from the Carolinas down to Georgia. Reported sightings would continue until around the 1960s, and still pop up occasionally to this day.

And they vary in appearance. Reports range from a particularly large and otherwise-normal-looking mountain lion — yellow fur, yellow eyes, screams in the night, so on. Some (as in the western Appalachias, descending from Nordic and Germanic folklore) have six legs — not four. Others, it’s a pitch-black panther-like creature that even the moonlight won’t reflect off of.

Folklorist Vance Randolph described the Wampus Cat as, "a kind of amphibious panther which leaps into the water and swims like a colossal mink."

Cryptic Kitty Cats

In the wide-ranging legends, the Wampus Cat has a pocketful of supernatural abilities. It depends on who you ask exactly what — but generally, a bone-rattling scream. It’s described similarly to a banshee in some parts of the U.S. — with similar connotations. The scream is a warning, and not just of impending danger of being a big cat’s Fancy Feast. If you hear a Wampus Cat nearby and never see it, someone close to you will die soon.

In half-cat, half-badass-woman form, the cat is capable of blistering speed, agility, and can easily hide itself wherever it is. It can navigate the densest of forests completely silently — at least until it’s ready to pounce.

Sometimes, they can shapeshift or even become invisible. It’s also incredibly intelligent — making it impossible to track, trap, or capture.

It’s a critter that’s ended up as school mascots (particularly popular in the South, a traditional stronghold of the Cherokee), in Harry Potter books, and in Dungeons and Dragons.

For y’all D&D nerds, the displacer beast — a big cat with tentacles, in simple terms — has been with D&D for most of its history. But it’s not an original creature. It was based on A. E. van Vogt's 1939 science fiction story "Black Destroyer,” and was called the "coeurl,” and it’s similar in description (an intelligent, catlike, invisible-turning beast) to the Wampus Cat — and similar tales from the Cree, Ojibway, Dakota, Ojibway-Cree and Dene Nations.

No matter which version of the legend you like best, the Wampus has lived alongside us for a very long time.

What’s that? You think it’s not real?

Well maybe, just maybe, that’s what Running Deer would prefer you to think.

Just be careful getting home from the forest tonight.

If you enjoyed this piece, come say hi on Substack. You can find more of my writing about nature, wildlife (real and imagined), and Americana on A Boy & His Dog Save America.