Regular Episode
#177 – APPALACHIAN MONSTERS
November 11, 2018

#177 – APPALACHIAN MONSTERS

🎙️ Blake Smith welcomes journalist and folklorist Asher Elbein and concept artist Tiffany Turrill to talk monsters, witches, and the living folklore of Appalachia. The occasion is their Anna O’Brien: Ghost Days anthology — a Kickstarter-funded illustrated fiction project drawing deeply on authentic Appalachian and Cherokee folk traditions. (Karen couldn’t make this one, but the mountains provided more than enough company.)

Blake opens with a personal meditation on the word “booger” — Booger Hollow Roads, Booger Hollow towns, the boogeyman his grandmother warned him about — and the theory that at least some booger-monster legends may have served a practical purpose: keeping revenuers away from moonshine stills. Spirits to protect the spirits, as he puts it. The episode then widens into a rich conversation about the folklore sources behind the book, the complicated cultural history of Appalachia, and a parade of genuinely unsettling creatures.

🏔️ Appalachia, Its People, and the Folklore Problem

Asher explains that researching Appalachian folklore turns out to be surprisingly fragmented — there’s no single authoritative survey. You have to triangulate across regional compilations: Tennessee here, West Virginia there, the Smokies somewhere else. Two books he recommends that aren’t about folklore at all but are essential context are 📚 Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia 💵 by Steven Stoll and 📚 Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area 💵 by Harry Caudill (1962). Both trace how the region’s people went from being celebrated frontier pioneers to being caricatured as backwards hillbillies — a process Asher describes as a kind of “monsterization” of real people, most visible in the lingering resentment toward films like 🎬 Deliverance 💵.

Tiffany adds a related thread: much of what we think of as distinctly Appalachian ghost and witch lore arrived almost one-for-one from the Scots-Irish settlers who populated the mountains. Black dog myths, death omens, river spirits, shape-changing witches — these transplants from the British Isles took root and hybridized with Indigenous and African-American traditions over the following centuries.

📖 The Folklore Sources Behind Anna O’Brien

The research stack for the project is genuinely formidable. Asher singles out several books as especially foundational:

– 📚 Strange Tales of the Dark and Bloody Ground 💵 by Christopher Coleman — a solid regional overview.
– 📚 Witches, Ghosts and Signs 💵 by Patrick Gainer — a rich compilation of Virginia ghost and witch lore.
– 📚 The Silver Bullet and Other American Witch Stories 💵 by Hubert Davis — described as “a fantastic treasury of American witch narratives and motifs.”
– James Mooney‘s 📚 Myths of the Cherokee 💵 (and his Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee) — first-person ethnographic interviews with members of the Eastern and Western Band, containing, as Asher puts it, “a lot of really good monsters.”

Blake notes the Silver Bullet book connects to a recurring MonsterTalk theme: silver bullets in American folk tradition were far more strongly associated with witches and shape-changers than with werewolves — the werewolf connection is largely a 20th-century pop-culture retrofitting.

The literary precursor looming largest over the project is Manly Wade Wellman and his Silver John (also known as John the Balladeer) series of Appalachian folk-horror stories. Blake recalls that the first scary story he ever read — a Wellman tale featuring the Behinder, encountered in an Alfred Hitchcock anthology — made such an impression on seven-year-old him that he tore the pages out and nailed them to his favorite tree. The conversation also touches on Earl Hamner Jr., who wrote several Appalachian-inflected episodes of The Twilight Zone before going on to create The Waltons — including episodes that brush up against Wampus Cat-adjacent territory.

🐈 The Wampus Cat and the Problem of Invented Folklore

The Wampus Cat gets a lengthy discussion. Descriptions range from a ghostly cougar to a cougar that walks on two legs to a woman cursed into cat form by Cherokee medicine men for spying on sacred male rituals. Asher is careful to note that unpicking which elements are genuinely pre-colonial Cherokee and which accreted later is extremely difficult — even the name’s origin is unclear.

This leads into a broader point both guests find fascinating: the feedback loop between fiction and folklore. Wellman’s invented creature the Gardinel — a carnivorous cabin-plant-spirit — has since appeared in cryptid and folklore literature as though it were a genuine folk tradition. Blake calls this “genetic material being swapped between fiction and folklore and actual sightings,” and floats the idea of eventually having Susan Blackmore on to discuss memetics as a lens for how monster-ideas propagate.

🪶 Cherokee Monsters: Raven Mockers, the Ewa, and Tlanusi

Several Cherokee supernatural entities play major roles in the anthology:

– The Raven Mocker (Kâ’lanû Ahkyeli’skï) — an invisible death-spirit that clusters around the dying, stealing the remaining years of the victim’s life and adding them to its own. Only a specially trained shaman can perceive or defeat it. Tiffany describes the design challenge of depicting something deliberately undepictable: her solution was to give the creature no defined upper edges, only long spindling legs and a dead-eyed ceramic mask.
– The Ewa — a large, spindly spirit of madness that features in the first story of the anthology, derived from a Cherokee folktale about a woman whose husband is driven insane and must be protected by a specially made mask.
– Tlanusi, the giant leech of Murphy, North Carolina — a Cherokee monster said to inhabit the confluence of two rivers. Unlike most defeat-the-monster folktales, this one ends with the brave hero being eaten and the community simply deciding not to use that stretch of river anymore.

🐕 Black Dogs, Silver Bullets, and the Scots-Irish Legacy

The Black Shuck appears in the anthology both as a straightforward monster and, later, as a figure for mental illness and depression — something Asher says he was able to “really dial into” from personal experience. Blake contributes his own Black Dog story: while training to join the Navy, he was regularly accompanied on nighttime runs by a one-eyed, underbite-afflicted black Lab belonging to a neighbor. After being told the dog had died, he saw it again — and eventually discovered the neighbor had just told people it died so she could let it run loose at night. “It wasn’t actually dead.” A mundane explanation, delivered perfectly.

Tiffany traces how the Scots-Irish diaspora carried folklore nearly unchanged from the British Isles: black dog omens, mirror-crack death warnings, river-spirit traditions (later reframed as baptism lore), and the shape-changing-witch-shot-with-silver-bullet complex — the last of which Blake notes was robustly witch-specific before Hollywood reassigned it to werewolves in the mid-20th century. The group also briefly discusses the loup-garou‘s transformation from a classical European werewolf into a swamp-dwelling boogeyman in French-influenced American territories, and the cross-pollination of hoodoo traditions — including the use of goofer dust (graveyard dirt carrying the sympathetic power of the deceased) — into the broader regional folk-magic ecosystem.

🎨 Art, Ecology, and Why Monsters Matter

Tiffany describes her artistic approach as rooted in naturalism: she wanted to depict creatures the way a field observer would see an animal — not posed or aggressive, just present. Her background almost went toward marine biology (she singles out a lifelong love of oarfish, goblin sharks, and deep-sea oddities), and that sensibility bleeds into how the monsters in the book feel grounded rather than theatrical.

Asher frames the entire project around the idea of a “supernatural ecosystem” — one where the logging of forests affects the spooky entities that live there just as much as it affects the salamanders. He invokes George R.R. Martin’s approach to worldbuilding in A Song of Ice and Fire as a model: take the bestiary 100% seriously, alongside the economic anxieties and the harvest and the bank repossessing the home place. The monsters, he argues, earn their weight when they carry cultural baggage — “a ghost is just the past that won’t lie down” — while still functioning as genuine monsters.

The episode closes with a brief mention of the Snallygaster (earmarked for a future story) and the Ozark legend of the Gowrow, a tusked cave-dwelling lizard whose specimens allegedly shipped to the Smithsonian and never arrived — right on time for the show’s tradition of cryptid specimens lost in transit.

📚 Further Reading

– 📚 Strange Tales of the Dark and Bloody Ground 💵 by Christopher Coleman
– 📚 Witches, Ghosts and Signs 💵 by Patrick Gainer
– 📚 The Silver Bullet and Other American Witch Stories 💵 by Hubert Davis
– 📚 Myths of the Cherokee 💵 by James Mooney
– 📚 Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia 💵 by Steven Stoll
– 📚 Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area 💵 by Harry Caudill

🔗 Related Links

– Appalachian Mountains (Wikipedia)
– What makes a mountain? (USGS)
– Manly Wade Wellman — Silver John series
– Earl Hamner Jr. — Twilight Zone and The Waltons
– Wampus Cat
– Raven Mocker (Cherokee folklore)
– Snallygaster
– Black Dog folklore
– Cadborosaurus
– Loup-garou
– Hoodoo (folk magic)
– 📺 Connections III — James Burke (relevant segment, timestamped in original show notes)
– Previously on MonsterTalk: The Black Dog of B

Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

Asher Elbein and Tiffany Turrill join us to talk about monsters and folklore of Appalachia. Their new project about fictional witch Anna O’Brien draws heavily from authentic folklore of this storied region of the United States.

Related links

Appalachian Books Referenced

Previously on MonsterTalk

Music

  • Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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