Across the Volunteer State, a myriad of local and regional names stand for Bigfoot-like creatures seen and encountered just outside local townships and communities. From the Flintville Monster to the White Screamer of White Bluff, to “Old Green Eyes” of Lookout Mountain and the Screaming Jacks of the Cumberland Plateau – reports of hairy Wildmen have remained consistent across the ages.
Whether captured in the tall tales of the European frontiersmen whom first entered it’s remote foothills and hollows or the matter of fact re-tellings of the Indigenous peoples whom once lived here along side them, within Tennessee’s wooded, rural deep country, legends not only walk and wail, they leave imprints everywhere – Upon the wild grounds on which they tread and in the lives of those that encounter them, the communities they haunt and the mythic stories and legends they leave echo across the state’s history.
From the Smoky Mountains in the east to the karst-ridden Cumberland Mountains of Middle Tennessee, and from the river and lake bottoms of the Tennessee basin to the sprawling floodplains along the Mississippi river at our western edge, the Volunteer State has always held a deep history marked with the mysterious, the extraordinary, the paranormal and the bizarre.
Most infamous of Tennessee’s fortean folklores is quite likely the Bell Witch of Adams, Tennessee – But did you know that a 6ft 5inch hair-covered Wildman was tracked, hunted down and captured in Middle Tennessee, near Sparta, in the late 1800’s?
Have you ever heard of the “Tennessee Pygmies” purportedly discovered throughout the nineteenth century, with thousands of them seemingly buried en-mass with their remains interned in acres-large slate-box graveyards along the western edge of the Cumberland Mountains? Were you aware that the local indigenous tribes of the region all accepted their existence quite matter of factly and both respected and feared them?
Were you aware that one of America’s first reported cryptids, the “Cheeklaceela” described as a 4 foot tall “Dragon”, was made by multiple military soldiers serving during the Nickajack Expedition of 1794, a few miles northeast of Cookeville, Tennessee?
Did you know that the region west of Nashville, near Dickson, Burns and White Bluff are legendary for sightings and encounters with the infamous “Werewolf” of Burns/Montgomery Bell? Did you know those legends stem from an encounter two brothers had that was reported in the regional papers of the time, in an area that’s now within the state park itself, that purportedly ended in the death of one of the brothers via the attack from a large, hairy man-thing?
The great state of Tennessee has a long and lengthy history with cryptozoology and strange phenomenon. So let’s explore some of it with the Researchers, Field Investigators and Experiencers that are out looking for these mysterious phenomenon, shall we?
