00:00:04 Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to Onyx Hunt for their support of this podcast. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. And on this episode, well, we're going to have a little fun today. Call it curiosity, call it feeling adventurous, or maybe just trying to get in line with seasonality. But as y'all know, if you've listened to this show before, we typically focus on things that are very well within the realm of explainable. You know, wildlife biology, conservation, specific species overviews, stories of wildlife history. Y'all know the deal. However, this week, we're going to focus on kind of the opposite of explainable. We're going to keep it wildlife and wild places with a little bit of flair of who in the world actually knows what happened. Today, I invite all of you to sit back and enjoy these stories that are Very real. Stories that are actually well documented and got coverage from news outlets. But did the events in these stories actually take place as told? Well, I have no idea. I have my own beliefs, but I suppose it's up for y'all to decide what you believe. So without further ado, let's dive into a world of unknown stories. Y'all ready? Here we go. Story number one, The Beast of Bladenboro. For our first story today, I want to take you to a small town in southeastern North Carolina, right around Christmas time, 1953. And I want y'all to keep something in mind as I go through the details of this one. Every part of this that I'm about to give you came out in the newspapers of that day. This is not a campfire tale that somebody's grandfather made up. This was front page news for literal weeks. And keep in mind that Front page, i.e. newspaper at the time, was kind of the biggest news in 1953 anyway. So anyway, Bladenboro sits in Bladen County, about 60 miles west of Wilmington. Back then it was a town of maybe a thousand people. It consisted of swamps, tobacco fields, pine woods, and a cotton mill that gave many folks that lived there a paycheck. This is the kind of town or neighborhood where most folks would have a dog running around in the yard, which believe it or not, is an important detail of this story because dogs are kind of where this entire thing kicks off, so to speak. So on December 29th, 1953, a woman over in Clarkton, that's about eight miles away, told folks that she'd seen something in her neighbor's yard right at dark. Every dog in the neighborhood allegedly started going crazy. She said the thing was sleek and black, about five feet long, and apparently killed a dog and drug it off. Now, people in that part of the world would have been seeing bobcats, you know, coyotes, their whole lives. So nobody really thought that much of it. Not yet, anyway. Two days later, back in Bladenboro on New Year's Eve, a man named Johnny Vouse walked outside and found his two dogs dead. And I'm going to give you his own words because they set the tone for kind of everything that came after that. He said, my dogs put up a good fight. And he said there was blood all over the porch, big puddles of it, and a pool of allegedly saliva. One of the dogs' head was torn completely off, and the other had its jaw ripped away. The police chief, a man named Roy Forrest, came out and looked at those dogs himself, and he said plainly that he had never seen anything like this before. The skulls were crushed, the jaws were broken, and there's a part that started to get under people's skin. There didn't seem to be much blood left in the animals. Kind of unnerving. New Year's Day came. Two more dogs were found dead. Over the next few days, more and more. The same pattern every single time. Crushed heads, broken jaws, and then the report started branching out. There was a reported goat with a crushed skull, a pet rabbit that was decapitated, hogs, even small cows, according to some of the old-timers who lived through this. At one point, the town had an autopsy done on one of the dogs, and the word got around that the results said it looked like the blood had been drained right out of the body, like some sort of, their words, not mine, vampires. That was at least the tone around town. Now, I want y'all to think about what this kind of thing could do to a small southern town in what is now January of 1954. There's no internet back then. There's no Google. There's not any trail cameras. There's no fancy testing or cameras. There's just a party line telephone and morning paper. And the morning paper is telling you that there's something out there in the swamps killing animals and drinking their blood. As you could imagine, this took a toll on this small town. It didn't take long before people started describing what they had seen. One person reported that what it was looked to be 90 to 100 pounds and looked kind of like a panther. Long tail, face like a cat. Others said it was brownish, kind of tabby colored. And some said it looked more like a bear. Several folks said it made a noise that sounded like a woman screaming or a baby crying out in the thickets after dark. The police chief said its tracks were about the size of a silver dollar. Others measured them quite bigger than that. Not long after, the Wilmington Morning Star picked it up, and the story kind of went wild. The newspapers called it the Beast of Bladenboro. Women and children were told to stay inside after dark. Men didn't go to their mailbox without a gun. And here's the part that I get a real kick out of. Y'all probably will too. Big game hunters started pouring into Bladenboro from far and wide. Hound dogs, floodlights, rifles, going all through the swamps at night. Some accounts say that there were hundreds of them at the peak of this. I mean, just picture it. A whole posse of strangers with dogs running the bottoms of this little North Carolina town, all of them trying to be the one who killed the famous beast. And you can imagine how that went. It frankly got dangerous, according to reports. Too many guns, too many people, too much fear, not enough daylight. The town leaders started to worry that somebody was going to get hurt. You know, there was going to be an accident, which is a fair concern in my opinion. And the whole thing was not exactly good for town business either. So in mid-January, a bobcat got caught and killed. And the way the story goes, it got hung up for the town to see and word went around that the beast had been killed. Just like that. Boom. Hunt over. Everyone go home. And after that, the attacks and the sightings kind of just stopped. But here's the thing. Not everyone believed it. Plenty of folks around the town said that the bobcat was way too small to have done what they had seen done. Bobcats in that country are not that big, and these were grown dogs with their jaws broken and heads torn off, and the people who'd actually said they had seen the thing described something way bigger than any bobcat they had ever seen. So, the natural question is, what was it? What in the world was actually going on? I'll give you my honest opinion from kind of a wildlife biology angle. The most likely explanation is some sort of predator, or maybe a couple of them maybe working together, who knows, doing kind of just what predators do. I mean, it's a small town that was primed with fear to see the worst in every detail. A big bobcat can definitely do some damage. A cougar wandering through would be rare then, but not completely unthinkable. Feral dogs can also be brutal on other dogs. And the blood drain detail, well, frankly, I don't, really have any idea what was going on there other than maybe it was just a classic sensationalism. But nonetheless, those poor townsfolk were convinced that a rogue vampire critter was on the loose. But I'll tell you this, nobody ever really proved what killed those animals. And every so often, more than 50 years later, reports have still popped up in that region of dogs found killed in a similar way, with tracks nearby. And nobody able to say for certain what did it. And to this day, this part's kind of funny, Bladenboro throws a festival every year called the Beast Fest right around Halloween. That's the sign of a good legend, my friends. One that outlives every single person who was ever scared of it to begin with. But anyway, that's story number one. But let's keep moving because the next one takes us to the great state of Arkansas. Story number two, the Falk Monster. Bear with me, because frankly, this one gets a little bit out there. For our second story, we're going to southwest Arkansas, Falk, Arkansas, to be exact. It's tucked right up in the corner where Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana all kind of bump into each other. It's a small country town located real close to the Sulphur River bottoms. And if you've ever hunted in bottomland hardwoods in the south, you kind of know what that country looks and feels like. It's thick, it's wet. Cypress and tupelo butt brush so dense that in some places you can't see 20 yards or 10 yards for that matter. Slews that can swallow you whole and the kind of place that provides habitat for wildlife that a lot of people will never even lay their eyes on. Which kind of sets the tone for this crazy story. In the spring of 1971, a young couple named Bobby and Elizabeth Ford had just moved into a rented house right outside of the town of Falcon. They had been there less than a week. And on the night of May 1st, Elizabeth was asleep on the couch when she woke up to something reaching through the window screen. And when she looked up, she said she saw a pair of red eyes looking in at her. She screamed. Bobby and his brother Don and a couple other folks who were at the house grabbed their guns and a flashlight went outside. And they said they saw this thing out in the yard and shot at it. It went off into the dark. A while later, Bobby was out on his back porch, and according to his account, this thing came back. And suppose grabbed at him, put its arm around his shoulder, and he fought his way loose and ran back inside the house. And this next detail makes this story different than a lot of other unexplainable stories. The man, Bobby Ford, ended up going to the hospital in Texarkana and he was treated for scratches and for shock. That's actually... On the record, whatever happened out there that night did send a grown man into the hospital. The Fords told the local constable that this animal was in fact about seven feet tall. Three feet across the chest, breathed heavy, moved fast, and apparently it smelled. In fact, people who reported it over the next couple years also reported a bad smell associated with it. Some folks said it was like a skunk mixed with a wet dog, which would be quite a pungent smell. Anyway, this is where The newspapers come in. A reporter named Jim Powell, working for the Texarkana Gazette and the Texarkana Daily News, drove out to the Ford place with another man from a local radio station. And when they got there, they found the family loading everything they owned into a vehicle. They were moving out. Moving out of a house that they'd lived in for less than a week's time. They were not staying there one more night. Anyway, they reported this in the paper, and the paper is actually the one who first named it the Falk Monster. You can imagine... In a small town like this, again, we're going 1970s, newspapers are a big deal, and you have a monster report going out through the small town, you can see how this kind of starts snowballing. Shortly after this, more sightings started rolling in. Folks reportedly found tracks in a soybean field nearby. And actually, I find this to be an important detail, an archaeologist from Arkansas, a man named Frank Schambach, he actually saw the tracks and he put about a 99% chance that the entire thing, or at least the tracks, was a hoax. But that didn't slow anybody down. A radio station up in Little Rock actually put a bounty on this creature. Over a thousand dollars. And you can kind of guess what happened next. Kind of like what happened in the Beast of Bladenboro story. A lot of hunters, thrill seekers, teenagers, a lot of them toting deer rifles around, started pouring into those river bottoms. It got bad enough that local authorities were genuinely worried that someone was going to get killed or seriously hurt. And sure enough, A few folks got caught filing a fake monster report and even got fined for it, if that tells you or gives you an idea of how wild it got down there. The very next year, a local filmmaker from Texarkana named Charles B. Pierce took that story and kind of ran with it. He made a low-budget movie called The Legend of Boggy Creek. He used a lot of local folks as actors and shot it right there in the bottoms where the story took place. In that small movie... made millions of dollars and played in drive-ins all across the country. A whole generation of kids, some of y'all listening, maybe even saw that movie or at least heard of it. Now, I want to be fair to both sides of this one because that's kind of what we do on this show. We do tell both sides of the story. There were skeptics, as you can imagine. You can find Jim Powell's article in 1971, and after the article ran, all kinds of folks came forward saying they'd been seeing this creature for years. Some researchers suggested a black bear standing up on its hind legs could explain a lot of these sightings. And I will say a big black bear in the dark standing at the edge of your yard after somebody has already told you there's a monster out there, well, you can kind of understand how people would turn that into something else real quick. But I will tell you what the people of Falk would say. They'd tell you that their grandparents talked about a wild, hairy monster in those bottoms long before 1971. They would tell you that the folks in Miller County... caught at the Jonesville Monster back in the 1940s. And they'd probably tell you that Bobby Ford didn't go to the hospital just because of a crazy story. And here's the thing that I think surprises some people about this one. It didn't stop in the 70s. This is not some old story that's been left in the past. The sightings, although they kind of decreased, they kept coming. 00:14:00 Speaker 2: For decades, locals in the small town of Falk have said that something inhuman stalks the deep, dark swamps in their region. The Falk Monster. Reba Killian was a little girl when she says she first saw the creature on a late night drive. 00:14:15 Speaker 1: Seven and a half to eight feet tall. 00:14:17 Speaker 3: And we just started screaming. 00:14:18 Speaker 1: We were banging on the truck trying to get our parents to stop because we were kids. 00:14:22 Speaker 3: Nobody was going to believe us. And we used to run those woods all the time in between my house and her house. 00:14:28 Speaker 1: And after that, I said, no more. I'm not going back in those woods. 00:14:32 Speaker 3: It could have snapped us like a twig if it wanted to. People are private back over there, and they don't like to be ridiculed, and a lot of times they get ridiculed when they say they saw something. No reason to bring it up to anybody. 00:14:45 Speaker 2: It is what it is. 00:14:46 Speaker 3: I'm not going to hunt in certain areas. 00:14:48 Speaker 1: There's several areas of this countryside here that I will never go into again to hunt. 00:14:52 Speaker 2: In the many years since then, monster sightings have continued, the most recent occurring just weeks ago. 00:14:58 Speaker 3: I first thought it was a deer, but I said, no, it's no deer. It had too big of a body mass. It's reddish-orange. It looked to me kind of like a orangutan. 00:15:08 Speaker 2: Locals have multiple theories about what the creature might be. 00:15:11 Speaker 3: I tend to believe there's something out there. I don't know what it is. I don't know where it's, you know, there's a lot of speculation on what it could be. 00:15:22 Speaker 1: Today, you yourself could drive through Falk, Arkansas. You could stop in at Denny's Monster Mart. You could see the track cast and clippings for yourself. Every spring, this is actually kind of funny. It's in parallels between the Beast of Bladenboro and this Falk Monster story. Every spring, the town throws a festival for it. The legend, just like the Beast of Bladenboro, has outlived many of the people where it all started. And in those river bottoms, people still go in after dark every once in a while, And somebody comes out running a little bit faster than how they went in. I mean, the whole thing is wild, right? This whole monster story has pretty much shaped an entire town in Arkansas. And if you're wondering if I believe any of this, I can assure you I do not. However, I do believe that many of the folks in this story believed that they saw some kind of crazy, unexplainable monster and it impacted their lives in a real way. But do I think it's real? No. Story number three, the wampus cat. For this story, we got to head east, up into the southern Appalachians, east Tennessee, western North Carolina, north Georgia, some old country stuff, some of the oldest mountains on earth, hollows so deep that the sun only hits the bottom for a couple hours a day. And if you grew up anywhere in that part of the world, there's a solid chance that at some point somebody told you to come inside before dark or a wampus cat would get you. Now, the question is, what in the world is a wampus cat? And I suppose that depends on who you ask, and that's kind of the fun of it. Some folks describe a big cat that walks in the shadows with green or yellow eyes that shine in the dark. Some, not many, but some say this thing has six legs. Some say it can walk upright like a person. Some say it screams at night like a woman. And just about everybody agrees on one thing, that if something was killing livestock up in those mountains and nobody could say what it was, people blamed the wampus cat. The most common origin story that you'll hear goes like this. A Cherokee woman wanted to know what men did in their sacred hunting rituals before going into the woods. However, women weren't allowed to see it, so she wrapped herself in the skin of a mountain lion and snuck up to watch. She got caught and a medicine man cursed her and she became half woman, half cat, doomed to roam the mountains forever. There's another version that flips kind of the whole thing around, and in that one, a woman named Running Deer puts on a cat mask to defeat an evil spirit of madness, and she becomes a protector guarding the land at night. Just the origin story. Now, I want to be careful here because I think the truth of where this legend came from is actually kind of more interesting than the legend itself. Scholars who study Appalachian folklore have pointed out that those stories are mostly told about the Cherokee people, by European settlers who came into those mountains, not stories that Cherokee folks told themselves. And the name itself seems to come from mountain dialect. Back in the 1800s, folks used the word catamount for mountain lion. And there was another word, catawampus, that people used for any mysterious animal out in the woods. Somewhere along the way, if you twist those words up, you end up with wampus cat. Catamount, catawampus, wampus cat, y'all get it. Anyway, the lore surrounding Wampus Cat did not just stay in the mountains. In 1964, down in Johnston County, North Carolina, southwest of Raleigh, a rumor got out that a Wampus Cat was loose near a crossroads in the country. And nearly 500 people went out into the woods looking for it. 500 people! I can't help but notice the parallels between all these stories. The Beast of Bladenboro, the Falk Monster, and now the Wampus Cat. All of them at some point had people so stirred up that a number of people, normally hundreds of them, went out trying to catch whatever the critter or monster was. Folks with guns, lights, and dogs all hunting a creature out of a bedtime story. The sheriff finally came out and called the whole thing a prank and turned everyone away. But I think this kind of tells you something about how deep that legend ran. 500 grown adults believed it so much that they went out and looked for it. The wampus cat even made its way west of the river, over in Conway, Arkansas. The high school mascot is a wampus cat. They've got a bronze statue of it, six legs and all. You can look it up. It's pretty wild looking. But here's the part of the story that gets me. I think it's the part that matters most, kind of. There was a graduate student in Appalachian Studies in East Tennessee State University, and he was asked about the wampus cat by a news station. He said, and this kind of caught my attention, that the descriptions people gave— the green eyes shining at night, the scream— killing of livestock, the big cat moving through the shadows, it's kind of a perfect description of a panther or a cougar. You know, except for the whole six legs thing. He said he was convinced that what those mountain people were seeing for 200 years was an eastern cougar. Now, think about that for a second. The eastern cougar once ranged all over the eastern U.S. Every single one of the mountains in the east had an eastern cougar on it, more than likely. And at the time of peak wampus cat lore, It was well before the Southern Mountain Lion was considered a myth. So think about the Wampus Cat in that light. A big, secretive, nocturnal cat that screamed in the night, killed livestock, and nobody ever got a good look at it. Folks in those hollas didn't have a field guide. They didn't have trail cameras, unlike those Falk County Monster folks that do have trail cameras and claim to still see the thing, but yet nobody has a picture of it. That thing's not real. That's not the point I'm trying to make. The point I'm trying to make is maybe, just maybe... those folks made a monster out of a real animal. Because them seeing a mountain lion during that time or having to deal with the consequences of a mountain lion is a very real possibility. And that's the part that really interests me about this one. The wampus cat is probably the most real story that we've gone through so far. Now, do I think all the lore behind it is real? No, I absolutely do not. I think those folks just had a classic case of animal misidentification, a large imagination, with a dash of sensationalism driven by fear. And I'll leave you with this one thing before we move on from this story. People in that part of the world still report seeing cougars. Some of those do turn out to be bobcats or house cats or deer or yellow dogs at a distance, but young male cougars from the West have been confirmed making incredible journeys east. So, who knows? Alright, speaking of large cats that nobody can prove whether or not they're real, let's head to the Ozarks. Story number four, the Ozark Howler. For our fourth story, we're going to the Ozarks, northern Arkansas, southern Missouri, a little piece of northeast Oklahoma. Y'all know where Clay lives. Those folks are kind of wild up there. Anyway, steep hollows, limestone bluffs, clear creeks, caves everywhere you look, some of the most beautiful country that's in that part of the world. And that's a fact. And for a long time now, there have been people in those hills who swear that there's something living back in there that makes a sound, frankly, unlike anything else in the woods. They call it the Ozark Howler. And they named it that after the sound that this animal allegedly makes. People who say that they have heard it describe a long, mournful howl that kind of breaks into something else. Part wolf, part elk bugle, part human scream, part laugh. Look, I'm not making this up. I'm just reporting here like a real journalist. This is a very serious story that no one should laugh at. Anyway, this is the kind of sound that if, I mean, if you did hear it, it would make the hair on your arm stand up, even if you're sitting next to a fire. Now, what does this thing look like? Well, that's where things get even more interesting. Y'all try to bear with me for this one because this one gets out there, okay? The most common description of the Ozark Howler is something about the size of a bear, but built more like a cat. I'm just, I'm just reporting here. I'm just reading What the research says, okay? Something about the size of a bear, but built more like a cat. Long body, thick black or gray fur, a long tail, eyes that glow red or yellow in the light, and then, depending on who's telling it to you, horns. Yeah, some versions of the Ozark Howler have horns like a goat, which I'll be honest with you, is where things get even more suspicious and completely bizarre. Impossible to believe, but stay with me. The legend goes back quite a long way. Folks will tell you that Daniel Boone himself claimed to have killed a big hairy creature out in that part of the country. Others will tell you about a pioneer journal describing a black panther screaming from the ridges. There was a whole string of sightings over in northeast Arkansas between 2005 and 2010. A woman sees a big black hairy animal cross the road at night. A man sees something at the end of his driveway. A couple hears screaming in the woods around their property and puts out a trail camera. Then in 2015, yeah, that's right, 2015, not terribly long ago, things got even more serious. A man came forward with photographs that he said he'd taken up at Devil's Den State Park in northwest Arkansas. Pictures of the supposed Ozark Howler. These things made local news. The TV station even took these photos to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. And the Game and Fish looked over them and said that this was flat out a hoax. Then in the year 2015, yeah, that's right, 2015, not that long ago, things got even more serious. A man came forward with photographs that he had taken up at Devil's Den State Park and said they were photographs of the Ozark Howler. This made the local news. TV station even took it to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. The Game and Fish Commission looked at them and said flat out that the entire thing was a hoax. They also said they had not gotten a single report about the creature in the photos. But there is a fun detail that the Game and Fish Commission also said that they do occasionally get calls about the Ozark howler, which leads me to address the wildlife biology side of this show that I think I kind of have to. So... The Ozarks, as most of y'all know, is bear country. Arkansas has a real success story with black bears about almost being wiped out in the 1930s, and then they were able to be restored. Now there is an incredibly healthy population of bears in Arkansas, especially in the Ozarks. So, you take a large animal that has black fur crossing the road at night in the Ozarks, odds are pretty good you're looking at a bear. Also, anybody who's ever heard a bobcat or a fox scream at night knows how a perfectly normal animal can sound like something out of a horror movie. So, what are these folks seeing and what were they seeing back then? Well, if I had to guess, probably a lot of stuff. They could have been seeing a big house cat or a black dog at a distance. Probably a lot of it was folks seeing black bears and some of it's just the human brain filling the gaps when something moves fast at dusk. But, some people will tell you that there's something out there that science just hasn't gotten its hands on yet. And I'll be honest with Every time I hear one of these stories from someone who's spent their life in the woods, a little part of me wants to believe that they're right, but I just, right now, I just can't buy it. But, the stories are fun. Anyway, we have one more story from the unknown, and this one comes from my favorite river in the world, the mighty Mississippi. Story number five, and our final story of the day. The giant catfish, the Mississippi. Now, This story involves a critter that has been living in the Mississippi River for as long as people have been on it, at least, and probably before that, to be honest. And unlike everything else that we've talked about today, this one we know for a fact is real. The only question is, how big does it actually get? I'm talking about giant catfish, and if you grew up anywhere near the big river, you've probably heard some version of this story, and it normally goes something like this. A diver goes down at the base of a dam, maybe to work on something under the water. And down there, in the dark, at the bottom of the river, he sees a catfish. Not just a big catfish, a catfish the size of a car. A catfish big enough to swallow a man whole. He comes up out of the water, white as a sheet, scared to death, quits his job, never goes back in the river again. Now, I do feel the need to point out that this tale is not unique. In fact, it's been told quite a lot. That story has been told about dams all over this country, at least that I know of. And I'll get to whether or not it's true in a minute. But first, I want to tell you about how far back this big catfish lore goes on this river. Because it goes back to the very first Europeans who ever traveled it. In 1673, a French missionary named Jacques Marquette was coming down the Mississippi by canoe. And in his journal, he wrote about something hitting his canoe so hard that he thought it was a tree. Big enough to nearly bust it apart. A lot of folks who have studied it believe that that was a giant catfish. Could it have been a tree? Sure. But, I mean, honestly, who knows? So, from the very first written records of this river, there's monster fish in the story. Or at least, kind of part of it. Fast forward a couple hundred years and you've got Mark Twain. In A Life on the Mississippi, he wrote about seeing a catfish more than six feet long that weighed 250 pounds. Now, Twain was a river pilot, and he was also a world-class storyteller. But you can take that one however you want. Back in the 1800s, commercial fishermen really were pulling enormous catfish out of the Mississippi and Missouri River. Fish well over 100 pounds. Those rivers no doubt held some true giants, and frankly still do. And the newspapers loved these kinds of stories. In 1902, a paper in Hickman, Kentucky, right on the river, ran a front page story about a farmer who nearly got killed fighting a monster catfish that had gotten stranded in the shallow creeks. In the 1980s, one of the grocery store tabloids ran a headline about a catfish apparently attacking a water skier that had bite marks all up the kid's leg. You can probably guess how true that story was. So, what about the divers that we brought up at the beginning of this story? I can tell you some experience with this one that I have firsthand. I was told when I was a kid about catfish the size of, quote, Volkswagen Beetles that would go after divers that went down in the Pearl River Dam, really close to where I grew up. I can also attest that this story has made its round and been told about multiple rivers and multiple dams. I also figured out something that I think is true about all of these stories. Everyone we've talked about today, the falcon monster, the beast of Bladenboro, the wampus cat, People want to believe it. There's something in humans that wants the river to still have monsters in it or for the wampus cat to still be roaming around. And here's the thing. As far as giant catfish goes, they kind of are still around. I mean, they're not attacking people or anything, but they're around. In April of 2022, a Mississippi man named Eugene Cronley was fishing the Mississippi River and he caught a blue catfish that weighed 131 pounds. Four foot, seven inches long, 41 inches around. The Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks certified it as a new state record. The fish that looked like it swam up out of the plasticine caught a couple hours from right where I'm sitting. And that's not the only one. Back in 1999, a commercial fisherman ran his trot line in the Arkansas side of the river near Rosedale and pulled up a blue cat more than five feet long. And the biologists will tell you that blue catfish can live a long time, decades long. which means some of the fish holding on to the bottom of that river right now have been doing that for a long, long time. So, are there catfish down there big enough to swallow a man whole? Probably not. But are there catfish down there that's bigger than anything anyone has ever caught before? Yeah, that's probably true. I mean, the Mississippi River is huge. It's deep. It's dark. It moves more water than almost any river on Earth. And the biggest fish in it have spent all their lives not getting caught. I mean, you talk to Any cat fisherman on that river, and most all of them, will have a story about one that broke the line. And I think that's what ties all of these stories kind of together today. Even the way outlandish ones. The Beast of Bladenboro, the Falk Monster, the Wampus Cat, the Ozark Howler, the Giant Catfish. Every one of them starts with something that's real. A predator no one can identify, a black bear in the dark, a cougar that we hunted almost out of existence, a fish that's really big. 00:32:25 Speaker 3: And then. 00:32:26 Speaker 1: We take that real thing, we add our fear, our imagination, and we turn it into a legend. Because the woods and the water are still big enough and still dark enough that it can hold those legends. And we don't really know what's out there yet. And I guess part of the fun is that we never will. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University. as well as Bear Grease and this country life. It means a whole heck of a lot to all of us over here that you listen to us week in and week out. Happy fall, my friends. I hope you're getting out of this pretty weather. I hope you're getting to hunt or enjoy the fall in any way that makes you happy. Spend as much time outside as you can. Just maybe bring a flashlight to make sure you don't go seeing someone's tabby cat and calling it the Ozark Howler. And stick around, because there's a whole lot more on the way. We'll see y'all next time.

Shop Now

Shop Now

Shop Now

Shop Now

Shop Now

Shop Now

Shop Now

Save this episode