A North Carolina woman details her family and personal history with the legendary Wampus Cat. She also mentions the Cherokee tale of how the creature was created.
I received the following account:
"I am a mentally stable young wife and mother living in the deep south, on the coast's edge, and have been in this beach town my whole life. You get a few miles west from the beach, and you're immediately in the country. My mother's side has lived here as far back as memory serves, and my father is a Sioux whose mother moved him here as a child away from the reservation.
Since I can remember, my mother's side of the family has had run-ins with the Wampus Cat. Legends vary depending on where you are, but commonly around here it's said she was a Cherokee woman who snuck into the woods to listen in on a males-only meeting that included the chief and their medicine man (not sure if it's the correct term for this tribe.) She wore the skin of a cougar as a disguise, but she was found out, and the medicine man cursed her to forever wear the cougar skin. She now stalks people, for what reason, I don't know. But it follows me. And my family. Always has.
We've gotten so used to the Wampus Cat, that we expect her when we move to a new house, or the seasons are changing, or we find ourselves in a moment of emotional weakness. When my mother had a rough day being bullied in middle school, back in the 1980s, she was crying and riding her bike home down a country dirt road. The sun is setting, but it's not dark out yet. Behind her, she hears this shriek. I've heard it before, and it sounds like when an eagle screams, but with that gurgling gutturalness of a cougar roar. So she turns around and sees a huge creature, with dark matted fur, in a stance like a gorilla standing in when it walks on its knuckles (back legs crouched, chest and head up and supported by the arms on the knuckles.) She turns around and races on her bike all the way home. She told her mom what she saw and calmly said, "That's a Wampus Cat. They've never hurt us, they just like to spook you." And that was that.
So I grew up with a Native father, who was very superstitious, and practically jumped under the bed to hide when we heard the Wampus Cat scream in the backyard some nights, while my mom and grandmother just kind of acknowledge, "Oh, it's the cat again." And I have gone my whole life with this as completely normal. Even when I got married and my husband was out by the woods with me, we'd hear that scream, see the leaves on the forest floor kick up as it stalked us, never coming too close, and have to realize that to people who didn't grow up in my town, this was a terrifying experience. It's like when you occasionally see a Cardinal in the trees. A bit different than the day-to-day, but nothing life-changing.
My closest encounter was one night in high school, my friend and I, and her boyfriend, were sitting on the front porch enjoying the nighttime salt air and the lightning bugs. A huge, gorilla-sized, extremely hairy animal runs up to the front of the porch and screams like hell's opened up. Now I'm semi-used to the critter, but I don't want it 5 feet from me. We go to her bedroom, and for about an hour hear it stalking back and forth under her window, about 10 feet down (coastal towns have raised houses on stilts in case of hurricanes). It was growling, spitting, screaming, and rolling around in the foliage, just being pesky and grumpy. Finally, it wanders off, all is quiet, and we fall asleep.
Every once in a while, I'll still hear it. It's just life here. This town is extremely haunted. I grew up a few miles from the Fort Fisher battleground in North Carolina and many historic and tragic places. I have too many unnatural encounters with all sorts of things to put in one post.
But my experience with a not-so-talked-about creature is just a part of life to me. Don't go out too late in coastal North Carolina if you're easily scared!" T
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