No. 5 Eva Grace and the "thing in the woods"

I'm going to take a break in the Jacob Oakes and children blog entries to tell a story I learned last week on a visit to my Uncle Charles and Aunt Eva Grace in Athens, TN. Eva is pictured here with Charles and Rubi. We were talking about strange things that took place at her home when she was growing up. More about that story later. Charles commented that the thing that scared her the most was the "thing in the woods". That got my attention so I got both he and Eva to tell the story. It was probably 1946 when this happened. Eva had to walk home from school each day. This meant a long walk on the Ridge Road to her house. One late afternoon in the fall she was walking home alone when she reached a point along the road where the trees lined both sides of the road and lurched out over the one-lane dirt road. She heard the sound of something pouncing around in the woods off to her left. As she walked along the pouncing seemed to parallel her. Then she heard an unimaginable growl that ascended to an eerie scream. Eva started to run, only once chancing a glance towards the woods. She couldn't see anything but she could still hear the pouncing footsteps keeping pace with hers and the screaming animal sound as she ran as fast as she could down the road the remaining half mile to the safety of home. As she turned left down the driveway to her house she still had a good quarter of a mile to run. Fence line bordered the driveway and beyond that were the woods. The animal was still paralleling her as she ran. As she came down the driveway her father's bird dog came out to meet her. No sooner than she reached the door and opened it, the bird dog forced his way into the house. She quickly closed the door and stood there trembling. What was this thing? What kind of animal in the Tennessee knobs could scare a hunting dog like that? Mr and Mrs Thomas were not home so Eva and the dog waited it out in the house. When they did come home they listened to her story and told her that the fox hunters in the community had reported that as they sat by their fires at night along the ridge they would hear an animal with a high-pitched scream off in the distance. Normally they could sit by the fire and listen to their hounds running a fox in the distance. Whenever this strange animal began to scream the hounds would come back to the fire and wouldn't go out and hunt anymore. No one knew what it was nor did they ever find out. Eva never had another encounter with the animal nor did she ever hear it again. For the longest time her father or her older brother would walk her to school and meet her before she got to the wooden area and accompany her back home.

After hearing this story we pulled up the sound files of bobcats, pumas, and mountain lions to see if the cry of these was similar. Not a one matched what Eva was trying to describe. What could it have been? What would you have done had it been you walking along the road that day? And you thought that the family history was kind of boring!