Varmint of Turkey Hollow
Posted by: Loren Coleman on January 3rd, 2009
This guest contribution is thanks to archivist T. Peter Park:
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An unknown 7-foot-long predatory “varmint” from the Brushy Mountains killed a hunting dog and pursued local residents in Turkey Hollow, Wilkes County, North Carolina in November 1944, according to North Carolina journalist, folklorist, and regional historian John Harden in The Devil’s Tramping Ground and Other North Carolina Mystery Stories (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1949, 1980). In his chapter on “The Strange Killer of Turkey Hollow” (pp. 147-154), Harden narrated a story told by a Cabarrus County friend from his newspaper days at Salisbury, W.S, “Slim” Davis of Kannapolis.
One cold November day in 1944, Slim Davis and his friend Code Frazier set out deer hunting near Moravian Falls and Pores Knob, with Code’s 50-pound black hound Jule. As they followed a narrow wagon road up Turkey Hollow, Code showed Slim some scars on Jule’s leg and ears, made some time earlier by an unknown assailant. She had a long ragged scar on her leg from shoulder to knee, and her ears had been slit in a dozen places, either by a fang or a claw. “I don’t know what done that,” Code told Slim, “but whatever it was, it’s the only thing that ever whipped Jule.” A dog hadn’t given Jule these wounds, he added. “Whatever done that whipped every dog in the country–and Jule twice.” Code said that he had been working in an apple orchard near that very spot in Turkey Hollow when Jule first jumped it. He had found poor Jule limping home an hour later, bloody, severely hurt, from her encounter with the “varmint.”
As Slim and Code were talking that morning, Jule suddenly ran off–and then a thin whine sounded down on the slope below them, followed by a long drawn out baying, as they approached a cliff called the Devil’s Smokehouse. Then they heard Jule yelping in a frenzy of excitement. They heard Jule running and yelping in pursuit of what they thought must be a fox toward Snaggy Mountain and the Devil’s Smokehouse. Code’s grim voice then snapped them back to reality. “That’s no fox, either,” he said. “That’s the varmint she’s after again.” A few minutes later, Slim and Code stood just below the Devil’s Smokehouse rocks, a 50-foot cliff running a quarter of a mile east and west, across the rim of Turkey Hollow. Then Jule’s hunting sound reached its highest peak–and abruptly ended.
Slim and Code looked for Jule, but never found her. Code’s dog was never seen again that November day in 1944. Arthur Edsel, Raymond and Willard Lane, Galen Hood, and Reid Anderson helped in the search for days. They covered the whole area by foot, inch by inch, but never found a trace of Jule.
Did they ever find out what the “varmint” was?, Harden asked.
No, but there was a story of how it chased the Lane boys out of Turkey Hollow the next night after Jule disappeared. Then Reid Anderson said that it jumped into the road in front of him as he was coming through the adjoining Shandy Hollow two nights later. Reid said it looked like it was seven feet long. He took a few shots at it with his .38 but seemed to have missed. After that the varmint retired, as far as anyone knows.John Harden, The Devil’s Tramping Ground, p. 154.
Unfortunately, none of the witnesses–neither the Lane boys nor Reid Anderson–described the “varmint” in any detail. Did it look like a big cat, or was it bear-like, dog-like, or wolf-like? What color was it? Harden himself thought it might have been a “panther” (puma or mountain lion). Several successive forest fires in the Blue Ridge in 1942 and 1943, it had been suggested, had driven a lot of the wildlife, including bear and deer, over into the Brushies and along the Yadkin River valley. In that migratory flight from the fires, “a panther may have left his usual habitat and come to the Brushies to make his home” (p. 154).
A tantalizing thought, though perhaps forever unverifiable–could it have been one of those frequently-reported cryptid “black mystery cats”?
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Great story,thanks for the post!
Another intriguing historical tidbit. Thanks, Loren.
It will be forever unverified, unless there are more accounts yet to be uncovered. My first thought was “big mountain lion.”
My first thought was one the last remaining mt. lions in those parts. There were a few pretty reliable of lions still popping up in the 30s and 40s. But they were getting awfully, awfully scarce by then. Some controversy about lions still existing in Smoky Mt. National Park in the 60s.
Are they coming back? The evidence is pretty strong in the Midwest states and maybe the far north of New England states. Personally, I think it is a little while yet before they make it back to the Smokies, etc. but who can tell?