Cryptid Sightings of the Southeast

Investigated report

Two men driving separate trucks southbound just after midnight came up on something hunched over what looked like a dead deer, about five yards off the pavement in the median. The lead driver — a lifelong hunter — got a clear look from roughly seventy-five yards: long coarse hair, brown going to black, matted into what he called a rat's nest. It raised its head and looked straight at them as they went past. His brother-in-law, in the second truck, saw the same thing.

Source: BFRO Report #15060

Investigated report

McMinn County has produced two reports six years apart. The first came from a young witness on a family farm at Chestua in 1981. The second, in 1987, is the unnerving one: a teenage boy reported a large blond or tan creature at his own door, and whistling calls coming out of the dark afterward. That whistling detail turns up again and again in Southeast Tennessee reports, including one from 2024 an hour east of here.

Source: BFRO McMinn County reports

On the record

Four hunters camped at the foot of Chilhowee Mountain for a deer hunt and came back with a story about a wild man. What makes this one worth keeping is where it was printed: Forest and Stream, the leading American outdoor magazine of its day, which described the country up there as essentially roadless and uninhabited except for the occasional wildcat distiller. Later retellings gave the creature tusks and talons and had it captured; none of that is in the original.

Source: Forest & Stream, Feb. 8, 1896

Investigated report

A mother and her nine-year-old son were driving Route 61 in daylight when a large dark figure crossed in front of the car. They put it at eight or nine feet, black-haired, and as they passed they both caught a sharp sulfur smell. It paused to look at the car, unhurried, then walked into the brush. A week later they went back and found large impressions pressed into the grass and a flattened, bedded-down patch that looked recently used.

Source: BFRO Report #35914

Investigated report

A motorist on Forest Road 77, ten miles past the campground, heard a low grunt and then saw something standing by a creek bed. It was the face he remembered: a large round head with a lot of grey in it, heavy brow, a flat nose, big brown eyes. A musty smell hung in the air with something sulfurous underneath it. They held eye contact for a minute or more before it walked, slowly, into the brush. He came back the next day with his uncle; the ground was too dry to hold a track.

Source: BFRO Report #10771

Investigated report

On a daytime outing near the North Carolina line, a man realized a face was looking back at him from a ravine about fifty yards off — two round eyes under a thick heavy brow, a nose smashed flat at the nostrils, dark brown hair. It turned its head, looked away to the left, then looked back at him. The encounter went on for several minutes. He heard whistling afterward and left with a headache and a strong sense that he was not welcome there.

The investigator visited the site and called it a rare and legitimate daylight sighting.

Source: BFRO Report #77933

On the record

Less a single creature than the regional name for whatever is out there. The standard description runs about seven feet, fiery red eyes, long matted hair and a beard past the waist — considerably more wild man than ape. The documented anchor is a New York Times brief from February 8, 1889, about a giant hair-covered figure carrying a huge knotted stick, which answered a man's greeting with a shower of stones. Today the name gets used more or less interchangeably with Bigfoot east of Nashville.

The often-quoted 1871 McNairy County account circulates without any newspaper anyone has produced. Treat that date with suspicion.

Source: TheSmokies.com

Investigated report

Two men dredging a creek bottom for gold packed up and noticed something large and dark standing about a hundred feet off. It reached out and snapped a thick limb — deliberately, they thought — then held eye contact with one of them for ten or twenty seconds and walked into the woods. They stayed in the area another two weeks, smelled it repeatedly, and watched their dog alert on the treeline. The witness's summary was short: it wanted us to see it.

Source: BFRO Report #3008

Told story

A deer that is not right. Eyes set forward like a predator's rather than to the side. Joints that bend the wrong way. No fear of people at all, and a stare that goes on too long. This is honest-to-goodness modern folklore — it has no historical tradition behind it, it was born online, and most reported cases are explained by injury or disease. It is also the one on this page that teenagers will actually recognize.

Source: Visit Chattanooga

Investigated report

Morgan County has two on the books. In December 2009 a witness reported a large bipedal animal in daylight near Sunbright. In August 2017 a hiker found a footprint on a trail inside Frozen Head State Park. Neither produced a photograph, which is the usual outcome, but the park is one of the wilder pieces of the Cumberlands and gets very few visitors past the first mile.

Source: BFRO Morgan County reports

Investigated report

Hikers on the Fiery Gizzard Trail — one of the best-known and most-walked routes on the Plateau — reported hearing vocalizations they could not place. No one saw anything, which is why this one is classed as sound-only. It remains the single report on file for all of Grundy County.

Source: BFRO Grundy County reports

Investigated report

A deer hunter and a friend on Camp Road reported repeated high-pitched screaming off the ridge — nothing either of them recognized after a lifetime of hunting that property. They also heard wood being struck against trees, had sticks thrown toward them, and once heard something moving fast through heavy brush. The hunter's own theory was that a recent clearcut next door had pushed something onto his ground. An investigator followed up three years later and found them still experiencing the same thing, always in early fall.

Walker County has five reports on file, the densest cluster in far north Georgia. Pigeon Mountain is a real WMA with caves and open hiking.

Source: BFRO Report #7088

Told story

A great cat, anywhere from seven to twenty feet long depending on who is telling it, dark-furred, with eyes a 1936 Knoxville newspaper described as small moons. Some versions give it six legs. Some have it swimming. Some have it turning invisible. Through the 1930s it took the blame for dead livestock and missing dogs across the southern mountains, and the scream — somewhere between a panther and a woman — is the detail that never changes.

A word of caution: the popular story about a Cherokee woman cursed into a cougar skin is not documented Cherokee tradition. Folklorists trace it to an online post from 2003. The word 'wampus' is genuinely old; that origin story is not.

Source: WFXR News, Monsters and Mysteries of Appalachia

On the record

A shapeshifting old woman whose skin was as hard as stone and whose right forefinger ended in a stone spike. She would take the shape of a grandmother, sing to draw children close, and use the finger so cleanly that the victim felt nothing and died days later without knowing why. Warriors could not wound her through the stone skin. They killed her only after learning her heart was not in her chest but in her right hand.

This is the best-documented traditional entry on this page — it was recorded by James Mooney for the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1900. It belongs to a living culture rather than to cryptozoology, and it is presented here as what it is.

Source: Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900)

Investigated report

The closest Kentucky report to this park, in the Big South Fork country that runs straight down into Tennessee. A driver on Highway 92 saw a roughly seven-foot grey-haired figure at the roadside. In his words, it turned toward him and its eyes were large and seemed to be reddish. Then it did something odd: it drew its arms up to its shoulders and pressed them down quickly, shook its head, and walked off with a deliberate high-stepping gait. He told his cousin the same evening, starting with the line every witness starts with — I'm not one to usually believe these stories.

Source: BFRO Report #5881

Investigated report

Two motorists on Needmore Road at early dusk passed what they took for an unusually large person walking the shoulder. In the mirror they realized it was standing upright in the road, turned around, watching them go. They put it at eight or nine feet and covered head to foot in long black hair. They turned around and came back, and watched it from about a hundred yards for three minutes in light that was still good enough to see by. It never moved out of the road and never stopped watching them. They left because they were frightened.

Source: BFRO Report #64024

Investigated report

Macon County holds most of the Nantahala National Forest and leads western North Carolina with six investigated reports spread over fifty years. The oldest, from 1973, has a couple describing something that turned and stared them down. In June 1985 a man reported a full daylight sighting at a creek outside Franklin. June 2015 produced two in one month, including one by a field investigator on his own. The most recent is from July 2025, two witnesses in daylight a few miles outside Highlands. Four of the six are direct visual sightings.

Source: BFRO Macon County reports

Told story

North Alabama's most persistent legend: seven or eight feet tall, covered in shaggy white or cream hair, red eyes, fast on two legs, and a scream like a woman or a baby crying. The scream is the detail every account keeps. Everything else is a mess — some witnesses report an upright ape, others a white lion, a bear, a wolf, or something like a kangaroo with a cat's head, and a few insist it changes shape. Sightings cluster in a rough triangle across Morgan, Etowah and Jefferson counties.

Straight talk: there are no named witnesses and no dated incidents anywhere in the mainstream coverage of this one. It is folklore. It happens to be very good folklore.

Source: 256 Today

Told story

Boojum stood about eight feet, shaggy grey hair over every inch of him except a startlingly human face — not quite a man and not quite an animal. He roamed the Balsams collecting the rubies and emeralds that wash out of those mountains, hoarding them in liquor jugs and burying the jugs in caves only he could find. The legend caught on around 1900 when a hotel went up on the mountain and guests started asking about the neighbor. A young woman named Annie surprised him bathing in a stream, decided he was just another lonely soul up there, and married him. Because he wandered off every night hunting gems, she worked up a holler somewhere between a monkey and an owl to call him home.

One folklorist claimed that holler is where the word hootenanny comes from.

Source: North Carolina Ghosts

Investigated report

A fifteen-year Marine veteran on twelve acres of field, woods and creek watched something cross his lit yard in what he measured afterward at a stride of eight to ten feet. He repeatedly noticed a rotten, dead-animal smell before incidents, found six-inch saplings pushed flat with the ground scratched up around them, and had rocks thrown at his truck more than once. His brother saw the same thing cross between two parked vehicles in headlights, and a neighbor watched it eating pears off her tree.

Same Lookout Mountain ridgeline that runs up into Chattanooga. Worth noting that DeKalb County next door — Fort Payne, DeSoto State Park, Little River Canyon — has zero reports on file, whatever the internet tells you.

Source: BFRO Report #37094

Investigated report

Two boys walking home from basketball saw something trying to hide behind a tree fifteen or twenty feet away — badly, because it was about eight feet tall. What frightened them most was that its eyes glowed red while it was still daylight. The investigator recorded dark fur over most of the face, black skin ringing deep-set eyes, and hands he described as roughly five times the size of a man's. Neighbors that season reported a root cellar broken into and hunters chased off their own ground.

Source: BFRO Report #23293

Told story

A settler built a house southwest of what is now White Bluff, and not long after, his family started hearing screaming out of the woods. He took a rifle and a lantern and went after it. He got lost. By the time he found his way back, his wife and seven children were dead — and the screaming did not stop. What people report today is a wail that bounces off the hills so you cannot tell which direction it is coming from. Descriptions split between a woman in white mist and a white-furred thing twice the size of a man.

Source: WKRN Nashville

Investigated report

Five friends camping near Helen watched a silhouette on a nearby ridge stand up in full view and then cover an enormous distance in a single jump, in complete silence. The witness assesses livestock weight for a living and put it at eight feet and around 550 pounds. He came back in 2006 with his skeptical father and found no creature, but three things worth noting: a strong smell he could not place drifting through the campground, rangers writing off a ransacked campsite as bears, and a four-inch sapling twisted completely around at ten feet off the ground.

White County has eleven reports, the highest count in north Georgia.

Source: BFRO Report #23978

On the record

Not a creature, but Tennessee's best-documented legend and the one with an official state historical marker. Something calling itself Kate tormented the Bell household for four years — it spoke out loud, recited prayers, imitated the neighbors' voices, argued scripture, stripped the bedcovers off people while they slept, and went after the family physically. Andrew Jackson reportedly rode out to see for himself. John Bell died in 1820 and the thing took credit for it.

Source: Tennessee Encyclopedia

Told story

Nodoroc was a real geological oddity — a bubbling mud bog that vented foul gas and sometimes caught fire into a plume of black smoke, and which had a reputation among everyone who lived near it as a burning lake of hell. Guarding it, the story goes, was the Wog: jet-black, long-haired, about the size of a small horse, with front legs a foot longer than the hind ones so that it moved in a permanent hunch. Red eyes, forked tongue, a bear's head with the white teeth showing, and a heavy white-tipped tail it whipped side to side fast enough to whistle from thirty steps away. The bog itself weakened over decades and one day in the mid-1800s blew out in a blast of mud and never came back.

Before you go. The site is on private farmland with no marker. This is a story, not a destination.

Source: Into the Wonder, citing Wilson's 1914 county history

On the record

Herrington Lake was impounded behind Dix Dam in 1925, and stories about something in it started almost immediately. The best-known witness was Lawrence Thompson, a University of Kentucky professor with a house on the water, who gave a newspaper interview in 1972. He described something about fifteen feet long with an eel's body, speckled fish-like coloring, a stubby pig-like snout and a curled tail, both ends breaking the surface at once, moving as fast as a motorboat. He was notably calm about it: it is only a monster, he said, in the sense that an alligator would be a monster to someone who had never seen one.

Source: Pine Barrens Institute

On the record

A farmer showed a Pike County deputy five footprints pressed into fine silt at the water's edge. The deputy, who initially suspected local moonshiners were trying to scare the man off his own land, cast the clearest one. It came out seventeen and a half inches long, eight and a half across the ball, with toes that were well defined and deeply curled. A latent print examiner who specialized in primate dermal ridges called it one of a small handful of casts showing ridge detail he could not attribute to a known animal, and a university anatomist independently found features consistent with other apes.

Whatever it is, it is the piece of Georgia evidence that has survived the most expert scrutiny.

Source: Cliff Barackman footprint database

On the record

Between half past three and four in the morning in 1959, Mr. and Mrs. Boyd came on an animal at the roadside outside Saltville. He slowed so his wife could get a better look — and it came after the car. He stopped and drew a handgun meaning to shoot it, and she talked him out of it on the grounds that a pistol was not enough gun for what they were looking at. They drove off. Their daughter later described it to a researcher: light taffy-colored hair, a white blaze down the neck and belly, two heavily muscled hind legs, noticeably shorter front limbs, no tail.

The name Devil Monkey was not coined until the 1990s. The Boyds just called it an animal.

Source: Netzwerk Kryptozoologie, citing Chad Arment

On the record

It opened on December 21, 1978, when eighty-eight-year-old Minnie Cook reported a hairy upright animal near her home — about six feet, dark, small-headed, with an oddly flat face. Through January the community around Carpenter's Knob kept hearing a cry that slid from a low growl up into a scream; one neighbor compared it to a bull bellowing. Sammy Price described it letting out the awfullest scream you ever heard from the woods near his father's livestock. Searchers turned up ape-like tracks with a thumb-like protrusion, hair caught on logs, and a den about two miles off. The story went national, and Cleveland County has said Knobby ever since.

Source: Contemporary 1979 press, archived at BigfootEncounters

On the record

Mrs. Crouch was making soap on her porch under a clear sky when chunks of red meat began falling around her. She said it was like snowing meat. It covered a patch about a hundred yards by fifty, mostly in pieces a couple of inches across. Under a microscope the stuff turned out to be lung tissue, muscle and cartilage, and one analyst noted the lung structure closely resembled that of a horse — or a human infant, which helped nobody. The leading explanation is a flock of vultures startled into vomiting in mid-air.

A preserved sample still sits in a jar of alcohol at the Moosnick Medical and Science Museum at Transylvania University in Lexington. You can go look at it.

Source: Wikipedia

Investigated report

A commuter saw something standing at the forest edge in a creek bottom about fifty feet off and watched it for roughly thirty seconds while slowing down. His description: a big old hairy man, more human than gorilla, at least ten feet, jet-black coarse hair, hands hanging to the knees, no visible neck, a heavy brow over a sloped forehead. It did nothing threatening at all. It rocked gently in place and watched him drive by.

Worth reading alongside the Beast of Land Between the Lakes in the Hoax File below. Same landscape, one made up and one investigated.

Source: BFRO Report #13289

Investigated report

Samantha Meadows was driving Chambers Road on her two a.m. commute when her headlights caught something crouched in the brush. She thought bear, then feral cow, then realized it was neither — it was working the vegetation with its hands and appeared to be watching two deer nearby. She put it at seven feet and five or six hundred pounds, dark shaggy hair five or six inches long, a very heavy brow, and a face she described as square and blocky with wide-set eyes. When the light hit it, it turned and looked straight at her, then moved off toward a creek bed in a stooped walk with the knees clearly visible.

Source: BFRO Report #77879

Told story

Part man, part goat — fur-legged, horned, with a twisted human face — said to live under a 772-foot railroad trestle standing ninety feet above Pope Lick Creek. In some tellings it hypnotizes people or mimics a familiar voice to draw them up onto the tracks. In others it simply drops onto cars from above.

Before you go. This one comes with a real body count. The trestle carries active freight several times a day, has no railings and nowhere to get out of the way. At least five people have died there, including a twenty-six-year-old woman in 2016 who was visiting on a ghost tour. It is fenced, posted, and prosecuted. Go to the Parklands of Floyds Fork instead — same creek, no train.

Source: The Parklands of Floyds Fork

Told story

Along a stretch of Old Buncombe Road running through the national forest, travelers have long reported an enormous white dog that appears at night, keeps pace alongside horse, buggy or car, and dissolves the moment anyone confronts it. The standard telling makes it the ghost of a dog whose master was lynched for a murder he did not commit, and which has been hunting the guilty ever since. The curator of the county museum calls it plainly not a nice spirit, while also conceding that there are pieces of the legend that fall apart if you stop and think about them.

Source: South Carolina ETV

On the record

Starting in the 1890s, farmers in the wooded bottoms around Statesville reported a long-bodied predator with a large bald head, small eyes, long legs, and a tail knotted with eight hard lumps like beads on a string. Its call was a piercing, baby-like wail that reportedly left farm dogs unwilling to chase it. It took the blame for chickens, cats, dogs, a calf and pigs, and by 1897 the papers had it carrying off children. You can watch the legend decay in the newspaper illustrations — a grim woodcut predator in the 1890s, very nearly a cartoon by 1949.

Iredell County has never had a confirmed cougar population, which is exactly why the story had room to grow.

Source: AbandonedNC

On the record

Eleven months of it, all on one family. Rose Nunnelly saw it first by a shed at dusk. It later chased her husband out of a tobacco field, and the children watched it standing over the corn. They put it at eight feet or better, square-jawed, with reddish-grey hair so thin and patchy that they said it looked very old. A closer encounter produced a stranger description — a short muzzle with long pointed fangs top and bottom, black skin, red eyes. After eleven months the family gave up and moved into town.

Source: Kentucky Bigfoot Research Organization

On the record

Clarence Cable, who ran a junkyard north of town, reported something like a monitor lizard coming out from among the wrecked cars — roughly fifteen feet long, with big eyes he compared to a frog's, an off-white throat and black and white striping. His brother saw it come out from under a stack of car hoods on the twenty-seventh. Cable saw it again the next day, threw a rock at it and fired a rifle into the brush. What makes this one a keeper is his own theory, which is more interesting than any monster: lizard eggs riding in from out west inside wrecked cars and hatching in the heat of the scrapyard.

Source: Wikipedia, citing the Trimble County Banner

Told story

Lake Norman is entirely artificial — Duke Power flooded the Catawba valley in the early sixties — which makes it an odd address for a monster and is exactly the joke locals enjoy. Sightings cluster at the Hot Hole, the warm-water discharge near the dam where fish congregate and, allegedly, something larger. The descriptions refuse to agree: one witness said it looked kind of like a gator, another put it at fifteen feet, others describe something brown that matches nothing native. The man who has run the sighting website for twenty years cheerfully admits there has never been one accepted description.

Source: Visit Lake Norman

Told story

The story starts with a student in 1949 who said he watched a disfigured man climb out of a sewer near Longstreet Theatre and go back down. In the fifties a campus police officer reportedly came around the theatre's loading dock at night and found a figure crouched over mutilated chicken parts, eating — silver-skinned, and with a third eye set in the forehead. Through the sixties and seventies fraternity pledges sent into the steam tunnels came back with stories of a man in silver swinging a lead pipe. The tunnels are real and their sealed entrances are still visible around campus.

The student newspaper went through its own archives in 2016 looking for the original 1949 article and could not find one, which suggests the origin date was added later.

Source: Post and Courier

Told story

Exactly what the name promises — something between a ram and a Sasquatch. Witnesses put it at six to nine feet, covered in thick matted dirty-white wool rather than hair, with curling goat horns, clawed forelimbs several described as disturbingly hand-like, and a sulfur smell that lingers in nearly every account. In 1994 two women reported one crossing an icy road. In 1995 a couple said a horned animal attacked their car and clawed at the outside of it. In 1999 campers fled something enormous and white that let out a scream one of them called otherworldly.

The name is modern and was almost certainly coined by enthusiasts, retrofitted onto older White Thing stories from the coal counties. Sources also conflict on the details of the 1994 sightings.

Source: The Singular Fortean Society

Told story

Georgia's coastal river serpent haunts the tidal creeks and old rice paddies near the mouth of the Altamaha. Accounts describe a long dark snake-like body moving in vertical undulations — up and down, not side to side like a snake or a gator — with a bony ridge along the back, running twenty to thirty feet. Skeptics point to alligator gar, which get big in that water and look genuinely wrong at the surface. The town has embraced it completely, and there is a full-size Altie sculpture at the visitor center.

Source: Discover Darien

On the record

Robert Cockrell, then a young journalist, was driving Route 119 along the Tygart Valley River late in the evening when his headlights picked out something standing near the water — seven to nine feet, broad, with smooth seal-like skin and, most memorably, no visible head at all. It made a whistling sound. He left, and published his own account in the Grafton Sentinel two days later. The town went briefly feral: teenagers combed Riverside Drive with flashlights and carloads of outsiders drove in to look. By the nineteenth the paper was already walking it back and blaming spring fever.

Grafton never commercialized this one. There is no museum, no statue and no festival — it is a story stop, not a destination.

Source: e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia