Varmint: 1944
Posted by: Loren Coleman on June 8th, 2011
T. Peter Park shares the following:
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.
If I remember correctly, panthers/mountain lions, make a noise that does honestly sound like a woman screaming. It is eerie and horrible and you don’t soon forget it. I would have expected them to mention that if it had made a sound like that. But the damage that was done previously, the ragged scars from her shoulders downwards does sound like a cat attack, luckily Jule must have been able to throw it off her back the first time it happened.
Sounds a lot like a bigcat seeing as how they usually stalk/attack from behind that would explain the description and area of the wounds. Remote possibility a small/young bear.