Month: September 2022

Tall tales of the tall. tailed and terrifying

By John Hood  
Illustrations by Harry Blair

It happened on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Just west of Maggie Valley, the parkway intersects with Heintooga Ridge Road. To the south is the legendary Soco Gap. To the west is the reservation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. And just up the road to the north, at the boundary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is a striking monument made of stones from all over the world.

This stretch of the parkway is one of North Carolina’s most beautiful spots. One dark and foggy May night, however, Ashley Coleman saw something terrifying there. “The hairs on my arm and back of my neck stood up straight,” he says. “I have never in my life been so afraid.”

Coleman had parked at a nearby overlook to watch the setting sun. After returning to his car through the billowing mist, he began backing up — only to stop short as a huge figure dashed across the road and entered the woods. “It was entirely too large to be a black bear,” Coleman insisted, “and definitely wasn’t an elk.”

What was it? Well, I obtained these quotes from the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), a 27-year-old group that bills itself as “the only scientific research organization exploring the bigfoot/sasquatch mystery.” Coleman’s reported May 30, 2021, sighting on the Blue Ridge Parkway has an official incident number (No. 69269) and designation (Class B, meaning “incidents where a possible sasquatch was observed at a great distance or in poor lighting conditions.”)

I begin with Coleman’s story in part because it’s our state’s most recent sighting. Many of North Carolina’s other BFRO cases are Class A, designating “clear sightings in circumstances where misinterpretation or misidentification of other animals can be ruled out with greater confidence.” In July 2020, for example, a Montgomery County motorist saw something bound across Highway 109. It was “large, maybe 8-feet,” she said, and covered in black fur except for lighter patches on its face and hands.

Every region of North Carolina is represented in the Bigfoot database. There’s the self-described “city boy” who went hunting near Elizabeth City and found not a deer but a furry, 8-foot-tall hominid munching on leaves.

There’s the vacationer returning to his Smithfield home and glimpsing “a bear walking upright with long legs and arms longer than a man’s.”

There’s the trucker who was headed up N.C. Highway 53 toward Jacksonville when a “very muscular” figure bolted onto the road. “It seemed to have no neck,” he reported, “just a head — sort of like a caveman.”

There’s the man in Archdale, just over the county line from High Point, who happened to peek through his front window and see a creature, also neckless and furry and 8-feet-tall, skulking around outside. After first comparing it to the ’70s cartoon character Captain Caveman, the homeowner reached back another decade for a suitable reference: “I guess it looked more like an overgrown cousin It from The Addams Family.”

And then there are the multiple sightings in Buncombe, Burke, and McDowell counties of mysterious hominids variously described as bear-like, smelling like “dead garbage” and swinging their arms “like pendulums.”

You have my permission to snort.

In olden times, cartographers would fill the unexplored corners of their maps with colorful illustrations of fantastic beasts and phrases such as “Here Be Lions” or “Here Be Monsters” or (on one 16th century globe) “Here Be Dragons.” But this is the 21st century. We’re supposed to be past this sort of thing. Plus, doesn’t everyone walk around with audio/video recorders in their pockets? Surely, we don’t need to place our trust in bleary-eyed motorists, excitable hunters and varied wanderers of the night talking of monsters ill-met by moonlight. If giant ape-men truly populated the marshes, forests and hills of the Old North State, surely, we’d have hard evidence by now.

I’ve always been a skeptical sort. Plus, I spent decades covering politicians. Need I say more? Lately, though, I’ve found my critical eye drawn away from genial true believers and toward what might be called performative skeptics. The kind who loudly, self-righteously denounce other people for chasing after Bigfoot and the like — and then, with a self-satisfied grin, glance down at their smart phones to check their horoscopes, buy healing crystals, watch New Age videos on TikTok or retweet their political tribe’s latest wild-eyed conspiracy theories.

When it comes to Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster and many other cryptids — a modern coinage derived from cryptozoology, referring to creatures known from legend or rumor but never proven to exist — the imaginative leap to belief is arguably smaller than for, say, homeopathy or ESP. After all, while the prospect is highly unlikely, it would break no fundamental law of nature for some kind of “missing link” anthropoid to persist in the wild or for some supposedly extinct reptile to lurk in a deep body of water.

You need not be a true believer to find cryptids intriguing. Just ask Joneric Bruner. He’s from the aforementioned McDowell County and one of the organizers of the WNC Bigfoot Festival in Marion, the largest event of its kind in the eastern United States. Bruner estimates some 20,000 people attended the 2022 festival. Do they all treat the existence of Bigfoot as fact? Of course not. Many just came looking for a fun weekend — and found it, by all accounts.

You know who else doesn’t believe in Bigfoot? Bruner himself. “I’m open to the idea,” he told me, “but I’m not going to conclusively say, ‘Yes, he is real.’”

Like Bruner, I’m no true believer. I’m just curious, and in the market for story ideas.

After authoring many serious history books, I decided a couple of years ago to make a turn toward speculative fiction. My Folklore Cycle series of historical-fantasy stories began with the 2021 novel Mountain Folk, continuing with a novella (The Bard: A Mountain Folk Tale) and a second novel (Forest Folk, just published). In my fictional world, fairies and monsters coexist with historical figures such as George Washington, Daniel Boone and Sojourner Truth. It’s an improbable blend, I admit, but readers seem to enjoy it. What they especially appreciate, they tell me, is that few of my fantastic elements are fabricated from whole cloth. Rather, my research took me deep into European, African and Native American folklore, from which I imported magical creatures to my otherwise-realistic depiction of early America.

Much of the action is set in North Carolina, allowing me to draw from centuries-old traditions of monster lore. Here are four Carolina cryptids that make an appearance in the Folklore Cycle. Each represents a different region and cultural origin, yet all share a gruesome trait: drinking blood!

• The Whipping Snake: Stories of lightning-fast snakes that whip their prey into unconsciousness, then sink their fangs into an exposed vein, can be found throughout the Southern United States and Northern Mexico. But one of the first written accounts dates to Revolutionary War-era North Carolina. British General Henry Clinton sailed south from Boston in early 1776 to invade the Southern colonies. Reaching Wilmington in March, he expected to meet up with reinforcements, but they weren’t there. What did lay in wait at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, Clinton later wrote, was a dangerous beast, the Whipping Snake, that “meets you in the road and lashes you most unmercifully.”

• The Gallinipper:  Several decades later, and further up the Cape Fear near modern-day Fayetteville and Dunn, the legend of the Gallinipper arose among workers harvesting timber and making tar, pitch and turpentine. They spoke of a giant mosquito, as big as a hawk, that could rise from a swamp or swoop down from a tree to attack. The Gallinipper probably reflects a blending of African and Native American lore. The Tuscarora, for example, told tales of a giant mosquito that “flew about with vast wings, making a loud noise, with a long stinger, and on whomsoever it lighted, it sucked out all the blood and killed him.”

• The Tlanusi: The Valley River runs southwest through the mountains to join the Hiwassee River in Murphy. Near the confluence is a place the Cherokee called Tlanusi’yi, “Place of the Leech.” The red-and-white-striped monster in question, the Tlanusi, was said to be as large as a house. It hid in an underwater cavern near a natural bridge of slippery rock. When someone tried to cross, the Giant Leech would break the surface, shoot a waterspout to knock the foolish traveler into the water and drag its prey below to feed.

• The Monster Cat: Tales of dangerous felines span many generations and regions. In the 19th century, the residents of Salisbury, Statesville, and other Piedmont communities spoke of encounters with the Santer, an enormous beast with glowing fur, long fangs, and a strong tail that, like the Whipping Snake, could be used to soften up its prey before going in for the bloody kill. Further north and west, mountain folk spoke of the Wampus Cat, variously described as having more than four legs, capable of walking upright on two legs or shapeshifting into human form.

North Carolina’s most-famous cat tale comes from the Sandhills. On December 29, 1953, a resident of the Bladen County town of Clarkton reported seeing an impossibly large cat on the prowl. Two days later, a local farmer reported two dead dogs. Their bodies were mangled and drained entirely of blood. Other attacks followed. On January 5, a Mrs. Kinlaw rushed outside to comfort her whimpering dogs. Something like “a big mountain lion” sprung at her, Mrs. Kinlaw later said, before retreating down a dirt road. “‘Vampire’ Charges Woman,” screamed the resulting headline in the Raleigh News & Observer. The so-called Beast of Bladenboro was never seen again — well, except on the cover of my novel, Mountain Folk.

✣

Now, perhaps, you can guess the real reason I led off with that May 2021 report of Bigfoot on the Blue Ridge Parkway. For starters, the incident occurred just east of the Cherokee reservation, and native folklore plays an outsized role in North Carolina’s tradition of monster tales. To the south lies Soco Gap, where legend has it that local hero Junaluska confronted the famous Tecumseh and insisted he not try to bring the Cherokee into his Confederacy. Junaluska has many adventures in the pages of my new novel, Forest Folk, including a desperate battle with a Giant Leech. And, as I mentioned, just north of the purported Bigfoot crossing is a monument made from stones painstakingly assembled from many different places. From the Carolina mountains and foothills, yes, but also from the White House, the Alamo, even the Rock of Gibraltar. As it happens, all these places are featured in published or forthcoming books in my Folklore Cycle.

What does that stone monument honor? Freemasonry!

History, heroes, picturesque locales, fantastic beasts, the Masonic fount of a thousand conspiracy theories — it sure has the makings of a great story. And a great story is what countless generations wanted to hear. It’s what the crowds of people flocking to Bigfoot festivals still want to hear. They want to live in a world where not all questions have been answered, where not all mysteries have been solved, where something furry, slimy, or improbably gargantuan may yet be lurking in the darkest corners of their mental map.

I want to live in that world, too. Don’t you?  OH

John Hood is a Raleigh-based writer. The latest book in his Folklore Cycle series of historical-fantasy tales, Forest Folk, was published in April.

A family brings the spirit of the Purépecha to Greensboro

By Cassie Bustamante

Illustrations by Miranda Glyder

Just over 2,000 miles away, on the small Isla de Pacanda in Mexico’s Lake Pátzcuaro, the indigenous Purépecha are preparing for the island’s 3,000-year-old celebration of Día de los Muertos — or Day of the Dead.

Here in Greensboro, Alejandra Ochoa de Thompson, who grew up next to Lake Pátzcuaro, readies her own Sedgefield home with her family to recreate some of that legendary magic for a group of interior designers during High Point Furniture Market weekend.

On Día de los Muertos, it is believed that the veil between worlds — the living and the dead — lifts, allowing souls to return for one day. The living celebrate with and honor those who have passed away by offering gifts to their dearly departed — from favorite foods to items that reflect preferred colors and interests.

“In every way, they are trying to please the person [they lost],” says Thompson, founder and creative director of Thompson (formerly Thompson Traders), a family-run business that designs and imports artisanal, hand-crafted, metal sinks, tubs and range hoods from Santa Clara del Cobre in Mexico.

Daughter Samantha Thompson Lizarraga, the company’s former marketing director and a co-owner, chimes in, “To celebrate their life and to give it meaning . . . this keeps them alive.”

Embracing the opportunity to share a part of her personal history and the company’s legacy with the community that has supported her, Thompson looks forward to opening up her home for the night. “I think it is important to give a little piece of us — a little piece of what we have had,” she says.

“It was [my mom’s] dream to work with her children,” adds Thompson Lizaragga, “but also bring a piece of Mexico to the U.S. So we brought the sinks and this is an even further extension — the hospitality of Mexico.”

For one evening, Thompson transforms her own deck and backyard into a scene that feels directly transported from the Isla de Pacanda. A canopy of twinkling lights and golden-yellow floral garlands representing Cempaxochitl (“the Aztec marigold” and iconic Day of the Dead flowers) hang from the trees, cascading over the deck. Candles line the railings and grace brightly decorated tables set with copper chargers, colorful textiles and goblets, sugar skulls, and menus outlining the five-course meal. Every part of this event is replicated with meaning and deliberation based on the centuries-old ceremony.

In 2017, the company threw its first Day of the Dead party, with a plan to continue biannually. Of course, COVID struck, making the 2019 event the last for a while. But this year, the relatively new tradition will continue and hold even more significance for most than before.

“I think it’s going to be more emotional because we have lost so many people,” says Thompson. “Everybody has lost somebody.”

In March of 2020, Thompson lost its CEO and close family friend, Fred Starr, to COVID. His relationship with the family “ran deep beyond business,” notes Thompson Lizarraga, who adds that the company will be eternally grateful to him for turning it around, navigating through a time of struggle.

As the youngest of 14 children in “a family that has been so close,” Thompson, 71, has seen many in her family pass on before her, most recently her sister, Susana. This year’s celebration will be especially meaningful to her as she honors her sister as well as Starr.

“People will remember how you made them feel,” notes Thompson, recalling how her own parents made everybody feel welcome, her voice cracking with emotion. “They were the biggest givers . . . I hope I can keep doing the celebration” to carry on their legacy.

People and moments from Thompson’s long life — sprinkled with bits of the celebration’s history — are present in every detail, especially in the extensive food preparation and creation.

Thompson, who does all of the cooking herself, says that it’s a moment to reconnect with her past. “If I cook a dish, I immediately see myself with all of my brothers and sisters eating,” she says, her brown eyes sparkling as she fondly remembers her childhood in Mexico.

Each dish has a story. For instance, the mole, according to Thompson and Thompson Lizarraga, originated in a Mexican convent. Legend has it that “a very important bishop” was to visit and the nuns worried about what to feed him. One sister added peppers, and another tossed in chocolate. Thompson says, “Now a lot of people make a joke because the mole has —”

“— everything you can possibly dream of is in that dish!” interjects Thompson Lizarraga.

For Thompson, the many courses served at her party represent “a part of the culture, state or a city and the history behind each dish.”

Chiles en Nogada, or chiles in walnut sauce, is a dish featuring green poblano peppers stuffed with a mixture of meat in a white cream sauce topped with red pomegranate seeds. As Thompson Lizarraga notes, the dish features the colors of the Mexican flag, celebrating the country’s own Independence Day.

This time around, Thompson plans to place descriptive cards by each dish denoting its significance, whether historical or familial.

The traditions of her country of origin are shared not only in the meal itself, but in the way the foods are presented over time. “My sister says in Mexico food is a sport,” laughs Thompson Lizarraga. “And this is still true for all of Mexico. Lunchtime is a two-hour period where you sit and have several courses . . . and talk with people and eat.”

“At the party, it’s three [hours],” adds Thompson, who wants her guests to have time to relax as they converse with others. What she offers, in addition to a delicious array of Mexican foods, is an opportunity for genuine connection. “If you take a little time to eat, sit in front of each other, you have to communicate,” she says. “And life is moving so fast now — it’s become so impersonal.”

After food and conversation follows live entertainment inspired by the festivities on the Isla de Pacanda. Thompson paints a picture of what the entire night looks like in Mexico, beginning with a candlelit boat ride to the island where a violinist or guitarist serenades riders with mournful yet beautiful songs about death. On the island, a parade of Catrinas and Catrins, which originated as a satire of European high society, marches along to melancholy music that “makes you cry. Because you almost feel the presence of all these souls that left — but you wonder in that moment.”

The festivities on the island run all through the night. “The cartoon Coco is not very far off,” says Thompson Lizaragga, referencing Disney’s 3-D, animated classic about a trip to the Land of the Dead.

At Thompson’s own party, there will be a similar, smaller parade, live music and dancers. She describes Paperhand, a company out of Saxapahaw that makes its own masks and costumes and will perform among the trees in her backyard the evening of the party. Paperhand has its own band, including a singer who sounds similar to the late renowned Costa Rican-Mexican singer Chavela Vargas.

“She had a strong voice,” says Thompson, “and she’d sing those songs and immediately transport you to another place — very sad and very dramatic.”

One song, in particular, she was known for is “La Llorona,” which means “the one who cries,” according to Thompson Lizarraga. While music is a universal language that can convey emotion, Thompson hopes this year to have some of the songs translated for her guests so that they can understand the words as well.

This year’s party will be the company’s third and, as Thompson Lizarraga says, “Every time we do it, it gets better. It gets more exciting.”

And with each passing year, the family sees how the party impacts its guests. In 2019, a designer who had lost a child was in attendance. Thompson recalls that when the guest left that evening, she told her hostess, “Oh my gosh, I am going to feel different now.” This year, according to Thompson, she plans on lighting a lantern for her child.

Thompson’s wish is that her guests this year are similarly transformed — that they leave with a sense of genuine connection, a feeling “that we have hope, that the soul exists, that we are one . . . that the soul is one.”

Thompson Lizarraga adds, “The world needs that right now: To remember whether you’re left or right, whatever your beliefs are, we’re all just people.”

While the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead lifts for just 24 hours, according to Mexican beliefs, the Thompson family’s hope is that the feeling of unity cultivated during its Day of the Dead party carries on well past that, and that we continue to honor the dead, but that we take the opportunity to be truly present today.  OH

Cassie Bustamante is managing editor of O.Henry magazine.