Wampus cat
the United States
Southern Appalachia and the Ozarks
Wampus cat — an enormous cat, between a cougar and a lynx, with glowing green or yellow eyes and a scream like that of the cougar; in some versions it has six legs.
- Variants and names
- wampus cat; gallywampus in Missouri; whistling wampus in the Ozarks; catawampus and catawumpus, older forms
- What is told
- An enormous cat, between a cougar and a lynx, with glowing green or yellow eyes and a scream like that of the cougar; in some versions it has six legs. Newspaper descriptions of the 1930s go as far as several metres in length and eyes «like little moons». Vance Randolph in 1951 records it as a sort of amphibious panther that dives into the water and swims like a colossal mink, that is as material for a tall tale and not as serious belief.
- What it was forthe author’s reading
- Originally it is not a creature of belief at all: it is a generic dialect term for a frightening imaginary beast used to scare children, and it is material for the tall tale, the genre of comic frontier boasting. Only in the late twentieth century does it acquire a narrative biography within the cryptid circuit, with an identity and tourist function.
- Where it is attested
- The Oxford English Dictionary attests catawumpus as nineteenth-century American slang, defined «a bogy, a fierce imaginary animal»; attestations in the publications of the American Dialect Society; Vance Randolph, Ozark collections, 1951; Knoxville News-Sentinel, 1936.
The oldest attestation that could be opened of the compound wampus cat is of 1921, and it is not folkloric: it is the name of a New Orleans football team. Conway High School in Arkansas adopts the mascot in 1922. The name, that is, enters the documentation as a sporting badge, not as a creature of story. - Caution
- The version that dominates today — the Cherokee woman transformed as punishment for spying on the men's rites, covered by a mountain lion's skin — is not documentable before the end of the twentieth century and goes back to an online horror forum around 2003.
And more can now be said, because the negative check could be made in full. In James Mooney's Myths of the Cherokee, 1900, which is the reference corpus of Cherokee mythology — one hundred and twenty-six myths, checked one by one — the wampus cat is not there: the word never occurs, and in none of the stories is there a feline. Nor does the collection Mooney published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1888 know anything of it. The modern assembly grafts generic Cherokee elements onto a pre-existing English dialect term, and is not to be treated as native tradition.
Anyone looking for the authentic Cherokee monster will find it in the entry U'tlûñ'tä, which Mooney collected from informants with names and surnames, and where the stone skin really is there: the atlas wrote it precisely so as not to leave this place empty.
The term and the function of bogey would deserve a B; the entry as «a creature of Appalachian folklore» is a C. The dating to 2003 comes from a reasoned reconstruction of regional history, not from a peer-reviewed study: it should be taken as indicative.
The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.