The Wampus Cat, Vol. 2, No. 9, August 1922

The story of the Wampus Cat

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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

In Missouri they call it a Gallywampus; in Arkansas it’s the Whistling Wampus; in Appalachia it’s the just a plain old Wampus (or Wampas) cat. A half-dog, half-cat creature that can run erect or on all fours, it’s rumored to be seen just after dark or right before dawn all throughout the Appalachians. But that’s about all everyone agrees on. In non-Native American cultures it’s a howling, evil creature, with yellow eyes that can supposedly pierce the hearts and souls of those unfortunate enough to cross its path, driving them to the edge of sanity.

Cherokee folklore, which is filled with tales of evil spirits lurking in the deep, dark forests that surrounded their villages, offers a different view of the Wampas cat.

An evil demon called Ew’ah, the Spirit of Madness, had been terrorizing the village of Etowah (or Chota, depending on the version you hear) in what is today North Carolina. The village shamans and warchiefs called for a meeting. The wise shamans told the warchiefs that sending the braves to hunt and kill the Ew’ah was surely going to be the end of the tribe, for the Ew’ah had the terrible power to drive men mad with a glance. The warchiefs argued that the Ew’ah could no longer feast on the dreams of the Cherokee children, and that something must be done. Together they agreed that their strongest brave would go alone, and bring great honor to his family and tribe by killing the mad demon.

Wampus Cat: the cat-like embodiment of a female onlooker cursed by Cherokee tribal elders.

Standing Bear (or Great Fellow, depending on the story version) was the strongest, fastest, sneakiest, smartest, and most respected brave in all the Cherokee nation, and he was chosen to do battle with the demon. As he walked from his village, the shamans blessed him, and the warchiefs gave him many fine weapons with which to slay the beast, and on the edge of town, his wife, Running Deer, bid him a final farewell. She would never see him the same way again.

Weeks went by, and there was no word from Standing Bear. Suddenly, late one night, the stricken brave came running back into camp, screaming, and clawing at his eyes. One look, and Running Deer knew. Her husband was no more. With time, he would be able to pick berries and work in the fields with the young girls and the unmarried widows, but he would never be any good as a husband again, and by Cherokee law, that meant he was dead. Standing Bear’s name was never again mentioned, but Running Deer had loved her husband, and she wanted revenge.

Running Deer went to the shamans, and they gave her a booger mask, a bobcat’s face, and they told her that the spirit of the mountain cat could stand against the Ew’ah, but she must be the one to surprise the demon. The warchiefs gave her a special black paste, which when rubbed on her body, would hide her scent as well as her body. She kissed her former husband on the forehead, his blank eyes staring, and headed off to seek her revenge.

Running Deer knew the woods as well as she knew the village, and she ate sweet berries to keep up her strength over the many days, but still she came across no sign of the Ew’ah. Then, late one night, she heard a creature stalking down by the stream. As she crept slowly towards the creek, she heard a twig snap behind her. She spun, and just as suddenly realized how quickly it could have been the end of her. Behind her a wily fox darted across the pathway. “If that had been Ew’ah, I would be mad now…” the widowed Cherokee woman thought to herself, as she continued towards the creek.

At the edge of the creek, she saw footprints which did not belong there, and her former husband’s breastplate lay at the edge of the water. As she followed the prints upstream, she saw the demon. Its hulking form lurched hideously over the water, drinking from the pristine mountain spring. The Ew’ah hadn’t seen her! Running Deer crept ever closer, and just as she felt she could bring herself no closer, she sprang!

The Ew’ah spun, and saw the Cat-Spirit-Mask, and began to tear at itself as the spirit of the mountain cat turned its powerful magic back on itself. The Ew’ah tumbled backwards into the pool, and Running Deer immediately turned on her heel and ran as fast as she could back to the village, never once looking back.

When she arrived home, she sang a song to herself—a quiet song, of grief for her husband, but also of joy for the demon’s banishment. The shamans and warchiefs declared Running Deer the Spirit-Talker and Home-Protector.

Some say that the spirit of Running Deer inhabits the Wampas cat, and that she continues her eternal mission of watching her tribe’s lands to protect them and their peoples from the demons that hide in the dark and lost places of Tanasi.


sources: Cherokee version above related by Enrique de la Viega, of Powder Branch, TN, on 7/11/03, posted to Ex Libris Nocturnis forum
https://www.americanfolklore.net/folklore/2010/08/the_wampus_cat.html
http://themoonlitroad.com/the-wampas-mask-story-background/
Mysterious Knoxville, by Charles Edwin Price, 1999

More posts on Cherokee folklore:

How Cherokee stone crosses came to be(Opens in a new browser tab)

Tsuwe’nähï: A Cherokee Legend Of Pilot Knob(Opens in a new browser tab)

Jocassée. A Cherokee Legend from Upcountry South Carolina(Opens in a new browser tab)

36 comments

  1. While there are towns named Etowah in both North Carolina and Tennessee, the Cherokee village named Etowah was in Bartow County, Georgia, near the Etowah Mounds (which were not built by the Cherokee), and Chota was in Monroe County, Tennessee.

  2. I live in northern Georgia and comment Dennis for his knowledge and his post. My late father always talked about a Wampus Cat and I was thrilled to find this post. Thank you so much! I travel to western North Carolina frequently and feel that I belong in the Nantahala area. I grieve for what the white man did to the noble Cherokee. As a side note to Tim Hooker’s post….catty-wampus is known to me and my family as “all mixed up” or “out of order” or “out of arrangement”.
    I just returned from a wonderful visit to Fontana Village…we went in February and the lake was almost completely drained…we visited Cherokee, Joyce Kilmer, Robbinsville, Lake Junaluska areas. I am infatuated with Horace Kephart as well and have hiked Kephart Prong several times. Simply put, I love the area and feel that I belong there.

  3. A year ago I got my family tree from my mother who had kept it all in her Bible. I am over three fourths cherokee Indian. My fiance had spoken of a Wampus Cat that he and his cousins had seen on our land as children.We moved to the thirteen acre property last June. I saw something behind our house that i thought was a ghost and another spirit just before dawn.It looked at me as if it were looking into my soul and what I felt was pure rage.When I described what I had seen to my fiance he told me it was the same Wampus Cat he had seen as a child. This is the first time I have looked it up and find this very interesting. Two years ago I gave my three daughters Indian names. My eleven year old named Hannah is the one I gave the name Running Deer. I never knew the story behind all of this and just want to thank you for post.

  4. I live in Atoka, Oklahoma. I am in McCall Middle School. McCall is the last name of the Mayor that built the school. But anyways, My school’s nickname is the Wampus Cats, so it’s
    The Atoka Wampus Cats. Our football team is good, and so is our softball and baseball team. Basketball, mabye a so-so.

  5. Catty-Wampus in our neighborhood always meant a rather mixed up situation.
    My people lived in Western North Carolina in what is now Eastern Tennessee. They traveled west and settled (some of them) in Northwestern Tennessee.

  6. The Etowah mounds in Georgia aren’t Cherokee mounds. They were built by the Mississippian Period mound builders (thought to be the ancestors of both the Cherokee and the Creek).

  7. Etowah is a corruption of the Muskogee word, Etalwuh ( E’tvlwv in our language)meaning: Their Town, as in someone else’s. If you remove the “E”, making it Tv’lwav, it then becomes personal.

  8. As a boy growing up in rural northwest Florida, my Granny used the term “Wampus-Cat” to scare us back into the house at dark or at dinner time. Best of my recollection, she described this thing as evil and “of the devil”. Ran on all fours or upright, long fangs and claws and his scream could be heard for a country mile. I remember this as a useful method for her getting my cooperation.

  9. I was attacked by a Wampus cat as a child. My Mamaw would always holler right before dark, “you kids better get in here before the wampus cat gets you” and we would come runnin to the house. A kid at school made fun of me for believing in the wampus cat. One evening we were playing outside and my mamaw hollered the usual. I shot back “Aint no such thing as a wampus cat, we’ll be in when the game is over!” About 30 minutes later I came up to the house and as soon as I opened the screen door, the Wampus cat got me. Its claws felt like a switch on the back of my legs. I learned that a wampus cat is actually a whoop ass cat and it don’t like being sassed.

  10. My parents are natives of upstate SC and made rare reference to something being cattywampus or kittywampus if it was askew or discombobulated. They were not superstitious people and so did not attribute any bad or mystical traits to panthers, “painters” or mountain lions, recognizing that their mountain ancestors were originally referring to the big cats when using the term cattywampus.

  11. I currently go to a school that uses the Wampus Cat as their mascot and the town even has an Indian name (according to one of my teachers anyway). All of the students there have made themselves familiar with one of the legends that we all know by heart. Personally I was thrilled to actually find an article with a different origin story than the one I was used to and had memorized.

  12. AS a teen I lived in the extreme northeastern corner of the state of North Carolina. At the time I was living in Pasquotank County, but this night I was in the next county over, Camden County with a guy who used to be my neighbor in Elizabeth City. He was an older gentleman named Dwayne, I was only a teen. I don’t remember what we were doing out at night beside some very dense woods, which he claimed to know like the back of his hand.

    We heard something crackling, I presumed it was a deer. I wanted to go exploring. He refused. I told him he knew the woods so well, and it’s only a deer, not that they can’t hurt you but… I’ve just always had the explorer “bug”. No matter how I tried to get him to come and explore… he absolutely refused. He said he was in those very woods one night and encountered a “Wampus Cat”. I was like, “WTF is a Wampus Cat?!” I’d never heard the term before.

    I’m a skeptic. But I could see that he wasn’t just joking around, he was genuinely frightened. Seeing him in such a state, I stopped asking to go into the woods. But, I started grilling him about this creature with, what I thought had an adorable name. If there were a Wampus Cat, I wanted to see one! If I couldn’t see one, then by jove I was going to get a description from a witness.

    What he told me was, he heard something, turned to look, saw shining eyes on an unnatural looking creature, and took off as fast as he could to get out of there. I said, “Are you sure it wasn’t an optical illusion from natural phenomena that you were just not familiar with? It could have been swamp gas, people see all kinds of things at night in such environments…”

    No, he insisted it was the Wampus Cat and would NOT and would NEVER AGAIN go into those woods at night ever again.

    I think it’s a great legend. I don’t believe in the Wampus Cat, but I’d still like to see one. If I saw one in a tree, I’d stop and stroke it if it were purring at me!

  13. I live in the MNT’s of Southwestern,VA>an grew up coon hunting alot with my Dad often while hunting at night we would have something that would follow our light thru the Mnt’s and it would scream at the lights my younger brother was always scared out of his wits by it.and my Dad would just say it was a wampuscat.several nights I had run into this thing always on the same MNT>and when my Dad seen I wasn’t scared of it he told me it was a obcat that would fdollow our light and scream at the light.it would never get close enough for me to see but I could hear it and several years later while hunting in the same area I encountered it again while walking out of the MNt.late one evening and It was very close and screamed very loud.but when I shined my light I could not find it .I kept my pistol trained on the spot it had screamed from ,but it was hard to tell if it was up a tree or on the ground,and I watched my back all the way to my truck but it diddn’t follow me this time .

  14. I saw what the old farmers in my area in north central Ky.call a “wompus cat”. It was in the middle of the road when I crested a hill on a remote country road. It jumped off of the road and ran into the woods about 50 or 60 yards. It stopped and turned and looked at my car. It was bigger than a bobcat but smaller than a cougar with yellow eyes and a disperportionatley long tail and it was solid black. I stopped at a store in the tiny town of Boston Ky and ask the girl that was behind the counter if she had ever heard of anyone else who had see it before and she told me that lots of people in the area have seen these cats. its about 45 miles south of Lousville in Nelson county ky.

  15. My grandfather in north west Alabama would tell me when I heard strange sound it was a Wampus cat,I heard a Canadian station this morning and I swear the DJ said it was Wampus cat.

  16. As a young child in southern Missouri my grandmother spoke often of the wampus cat. It always lurked just out of sight, as the night sky grew dark. I never dared to wonder into its realm. It haunted my imagination. To this day, I’ll warn my children “don’t go down in those damn woods after dark, that wampus cat will get you”. The end.

  17. Dr. Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs knew the Wampus Cat by another name, “Wooly-Bully”, described as having “two big horns and a wooly jaw.” Of course, they most likely had been smoking something when they recorded their report.

  18. They used to tell this story at summer camp to keep kids inside at night. one time in the middle of night, we saw a bobcat and started freaking out because of the story

  19. Pingback: Episode 88: WitchMama
  20. I saw a Wampus Cat pass in front of my Ford Escape just north of Gillman, SC as I drove just before dawn. It was big, as long as my Escape was wide. It was black with gray highlights. It appeared to be a cross between a black panther and a pit bull to me. It crawled low to the ground and moved like a feline, but it was incredibly muscular with a big, thick, wide head that looked more like a pit bull than a panther. The hair along the spine ridge stood up a little and it reminded me of a hyena the way the hair stood. The tail was short haired with a big tuft of fur at the end like a lion’s tail. As it crossed in front of the car, I swear it turned and smiled at me with a big wide mouth full of sharp teeth that seemed all the size; no large canines like you normally see in big cats. My new wife was with me on our honeymoon and she saw it too.

  21. We used the Wampus Cat story to keep a bunch of Cub Scouts under control at night during a campout in Marion County WV about 30 years ago. My brother even made weird noises in the middle of the night to make it more realistic.

  22. I never knew the origin of the Wampus Cat, but grew up in NE Alabama, hearing older people refer to it. Back in my teens my mother passed me coming in from working and said to go take a shower because I smelled like a wampus cat. All these years later I still wonder how she knew what one smelled like.
    Catty-wampus & kitty-corner were interchangeable in our house. It was just understood to mean not straight, or out of the normal alignment you’d expect.
    Thanks for sharing the origins!

  23. 1950’s Wood Co. West Virginia we listened for the Wampus Cat and went Snipe hunting.
    catty-wampus meant crooked, uneven

  24. I’ve heard them called depending where you live a (hillside wampus) my aunt went to college at Appalachian and the term is from that area so old creature wouldn’t want to meet one

  25. It almost sounds like some people think the Wampus cats are myths? Or getting them mixed up with black panthers. First time I ever heard of people thinking them fake. Now I have seen Black panthers in the woods, Maybe they were acutely Wampus cat, But thought they was gray But DNR says there are no black panthers around here So might be Wampus cats I SAW. At night they sound like a baby crying, Then they change to sound like a woman screening then after a long while they start that wild cat rowing. I rember as a young child listening to them from inside our old log cabin Made the hair on the back of everyones neck stand up no one could sheep till that thing stopped for the night.

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