Environment
The supernatural creatures said to roam these forests are intimately tied to the landscape, which is older than most of life on Earth.
ByOlivia Campbell
Published October 13, 2023
• 7 min read
From the Mothman, Wampus Cat, and Raven Mocker to the Grafton and Flatwoods Monsters, the Appalachians are teeming with supernatural creatures. TikTok is flooded with stories of #hauntedappalachia. And many people believe the high rate of mysterious phenomena in the Appalachian Mountains, a 2,000-mile range that spans Newfoundland to northern Alabama, is due to their geological age.
How old, you ask? Older than Saturn’s rings. Older than the ozone layer. Older than sexually reproducing organisms. Old enough to remember when days on Earth were shorter than 24 hours. The rocks at the core of the Appalachians formed nearly 1.2 billion years ago when all the continents were still one.
“About 750 million years ago, the supercontinent began to thin and pull apart like warm taffy because of expansion of the continental crust,” Sandra H.B. Clark, U.S. Geological Survey research geologist eloquently explained in the story of the birth of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. When the continents eventually broke off, a deep basin from the Carolinas to Georgia filled with seawater. (The rest of the mountain range shoved off to become the Scottish Highlands.)
Over the millions of years that followed, rivers built up the basin floor with sediments while volcanoes belched eruptions nearby. Then, the continents decided to change direction, sending them slamming into and over top of each other, bringing earthquakes and molten rock eruptions in their wake. It was an intense, volatile time, but it created a fantastically unique mountain range that, while crop-averse topographically, boasts unparalleled ecological diversity.
An ecosystem filled with life
Appalachian ecologist Elizabeth A. Byers says this topography “creates a vast number of ecological niches with differing elevation, slope, aspect, temperature, and rainfall. These niches have been slowly filled with species that are particularly adapted to their environments.”
In some areas, species have had tens of millions of years to migrate and specialize, “filling each ecological niche completely.”
Byers—principal scientist at Appalachian Ecology, an environmental consulting firm—notes that you can “walk in the woods and wetlands and find unusual species of rare beauty or fascination. What could be more exciting than happening upon a carnivorous round-leaved sundew, with its red tentacles glistening with glue-like nectar? Or finding the little holes where a northern flying squirrel has come down from the trees to dig false truffles the night before?”
One of the reasons the region is so rife with supernatural legends is not only that the mountains are old, but it’s also that they continue to appear old. Because much of Appalachia has remained uninhabited by humans, much of that ancient biodiversity is still with us, Byers explains: “The gorgeous habitats that haven’t yet been erased by civilization range from dark, misty red spruce forests to layered oak forests, from silver maple swamps along the major rivers to cottongrass fens on the high plateaus.”
Might monsters be amongst this ancient species still filling those niches? It’s fun to imagine the possibilities. Often, the possibilities noisily present themselves. These ancient mountains are a perfect breeding ground for all manner of spooky sensations since their age is almost palpable, says Ursula Vernon, a USA Today bestselling author based in North Carolina whose spine-tingling horror novels (written under the pseudonym T. Kingfisher) are largely based in the Appalachians.
“Their great age gives the mountains this worn, twisty quality, full of dark hollows and deep folds in the earth,” observes Vernon. “There are places you can stand and feel the age of the mountains pressing down on you like a weight.”
The density of legends is related to the density of nature in the area that’s unlike anything most of us are used to. In Appalachia, “it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the grandeur of nature because of the intense saturation of natural landscape,” says renowned folklorist Carl Lindahl of the University of Houston.
Lindahl describes the research of Pulitzer-winning social psychiatrist Robert Coles, where he asked children to draw what home looked like: “Over and over again, among the Appalachians—and only the Appalachians—home was the natural landscape,” says Lindahl. Kids drew houses that were “absolutely dwarfed by nature.” Some even drew just the mountains and forests, underscoring the sense in the Appalachians that nature is incredibly imposing.
“There is something in a landscape like that which humbles you and intimates to you that there’s something very big out there, and this thing has an awful lot of power,” says Lindahl. “Nature is the gateway to the supernatural. You can’t have the supernatural without the natural.”
Mountain folklore
Myths and legends have long been a way to explain the otherwise unexplainable in the natural world. Locations become active participants in the creation of supernatural settings once they are imbued with legends. Iceland has a name for these areas: álagablettir, “enchanted spots.”
While the Appalachian Mountains significantly predate the concept of language, as long as there have been people there, there have been stories. Judaculla’s Rock is a 240-square-foot soapstone boulder in the Appalachians that’s covered in over 1,500 petroglyphs, the oldest of which dates to roughly 4,000 years ago. According to Cherokee mythology, the area is the domain of the lord of game; a giant who haunts the land, protecting it from overhunting.
As this myth illustrates, stories sometimes have a deeper purpose; are meant for more than just an exhilarating jolt of fear. Leslie J. Anderson, an Ohio-based horror author and poet who cohosts the podcast The Cryptonaturalist with her husband Jarod, believes spooky tales are a great way to warn people about danger in a way they will listen to.
“I don’t want to tell my small child that he can’t play by the cliff because he might fall to a horrible death, but we can both laugh about the gremlins who might bite his toes by the cliff edge and he doesn’t go near it again,” Anderson explains. “We forget how dangerous forests and swamps and cliffs are.”
She notes that “Watch out for the wolfman” can act as a more effective stand-in for “Be careful.”
Or maybe the Appalachian Mountains have earned all the legends we’ve ascribed to them—and more—since they’ve been around long enough to witness the development of most life on Earth. The shadows and rustles of forests are natural fodder for fear, especially if you’re not used to them, but among those who know, the Appalachians are another beast entirely.
“In the Appalachians, with all the hollows (and hollers) and thickly wooded slopes, the little springs rising unexpectedly out of dark holes and vanishing again—that’s a landscape full of hidden things. That’s a place where the Devil can pace and strange lights can lead you astray, where you might see something that looks like a deer but doesn’t move like a deer,” says Vernon. “It’s fertile ground for fear. But people still have to live here, so we get stories about what to do when you meet the Devil or the not-deer, and the cautionary tales about what happened to people who didn’t do the right things. It’s endlessly fertile ground for storytellers, that’s for sure.”
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