I’m a little disappointed in the Ozark Howler episode of MonsterQuest. I’ve come to rely on them for going to the science, performing experiments, and demonstrating how and why a particular cryptid may or may not exist. Other episodes in the first season have done this, but here they don’t even go to the area. They interview some talking heads and feature a couple of witnesses, but that’s about it.
“It’s a real mix of known creatures into this unknown creature.” That’s how one of the talking heads describes the various reports and sightings. It’s a cat, mostly, but it has horns. Its eyes are red; it has a “death stare.” And there’s the cry, which is blood-curdling and terror-inducing.
The episode first aired in 2009 but seems to have been updated in 2019 under the title In Search of Monsters, and talks of sightings as recent as 2008. A woman sees a large, black, hairy creature crossing the road at night. A man sees “a black Howler” at the end of his driveway. A couple hear screaming in the woods around their property, and catch something on a game camera. A reporter mentions the photo of the cat-dog with the deer horns, but that’s dismissed as a hoax.
The episode progresses from most to least probable. The first suggestion is that it’s a large feline, Mountain lions have been sighted in the area, but animal experts maintain that these particular cats do not have a melanistic variant. Leopards and jaguars do, but neither is native to that part of the continent. Leopards are native to Africa. Jaguars range from South America into the far south of Arizona, but not as far north as the Ozarks.
There is the possibility of an escaped zoo animal or exotic pet. The problem with that is that both leopards and jaguars are tropical and subtropical animals. They’re unlikely to be able to survive the harsh winters of the region.
So maybe, the experts opine, it’s something more unusual. It might be a prehistoric survivor. In cryptozoology, that’s called a Lazarus taxon, a creature presumed to be extinct but found to still exist. (I’ll be talking about this, actually, in a later section of the Bestiary.)
There are a couple of candidates. One would be a creature called Panthera atrox, the American lion. It was very large, and supposedly the male and female were different colors. The male was “regular-colored,” i.e. light brown or tan, and the female was black. This species went extinct around the end of the Ice Age.
The other likely suspect would be the smilodon or sabertooth cat. This massive, muscular, shaggy animal was notable for its enormous canine teeth, but it’s presumed to have been grey or greyish brown and possibly spotted, rather than black. Whether it had a melanistic variant, the experts don’t know. They lean more toward the American lion in that case.
The episode moves away from physical manifestations at this point and focuses on the sounds it makes. People who live in the area maintain that they hear weird and unsettling sounds in the woods. But as one of the experts points out, the human imagination is a fertile and flexible thing. If it hears something unusual or untoward, it makes up stories and invents creatures that might have made the sounds.
I’ll add that when witnesses combine darkness, deep woods, and the cries of distant or unseen animals, they quickly move past the ordinary or the familiar to the weird and the terrifying. The mating cry of a female fox can sound like a human screaming in terror or a creature dying in agony. Mountain lions in search of mates will call back and forth, and their calls may seem to be coming from all directions at once.
I yelled at the screen at a couple of points. Whoever the sound engineer was, they seriously needed to be educated on the fact that mountain lions don’t roar. They can’t. Their larynges aren’t capable of it. They can purr. They hiss and growl. And they yowl and shriek.
Even a domestic cat can make an ungodly racket when it’s fighting or when it’s in heat. When I was a kid, we had a female Siamese who didn’t get spayed before her first heat. The noises she made were outright blood-curdling, and could be heard all the way down our very long driveway.
That was an eight-pound cat. Imagine that a cat twenty times that size can do when she’s looking for love.
Anyway. There’s no conclusion drawn in the episode. It moves on to the couple with the game camera. They recorded what seemed to be as many as three creatures calling back and forth—which indicates that if the Howler exists, there’s more than one of it. What seems notable to these witnesses is that the local dogs react to the howling. “The longer it goes on, the dogs become more and more intimidated.”
The expert called in to view the footage doesn’t commit to any species. He suggests that it may be something unknown. I’m not sure if that’s a responsible thing for him to do. He doesn’t test the audio, he doesn’t take it to a lab. Basically he just up and guesses.
To me the recording sounds more like wolves or other canines than cats. Awoo rather than a feline yowl or scream. But there’s no speculation as to whether these are wolves or coyotes, or possibly feral dogs.
The episode skips past the audio to a section of video that purports to be an image of the actual Howler. It’s blurry and pixelated. My eye, matrixing it, gives me something like a baboon. I don’t see a cat or a canine.
It may be full-on matrixing: the eye trying to create a pattern out of an image of leaves and branches. The animal expert says he sees a big cat, and we’re shown an image of a tiger. He can’t identify the creature, but it seems to me that he’s trying to fit the pixels to some sort of feline because that’s his area of expertise.
As with the audio, I’d like to have seen more testing by a less biased observer. Do the sounds correlate with any known animal’s call? And does the image portray something physical, or is it a trick of the eye?
Having failed to draw any empirical or scientific conclusions, the episode moves on to the paranormal. Black cats historically are bad luck, we’re told. They’re “inherently evil.” They’re associated with witchcraft and the demonic. Maybe they’re shapeshifting witches. Or at least a witch’s familiar.
There’s even a historical connection. Well, not exactly, but a witch in the 1500s supposedly had a demonic cat named Satan or Sathan, and he apparently was huge and had horns. So maybe somehow that legend, or one very similar to it, made it into the Ozarks with European settlers.
Witchcraft was a frequent practice among the colonists. Maybe the Howler was, or is, a witch’s familiar, or a witch in animal form. Or else it’s a demon—and then we have to ask, does it serve the witches, or do the witches serve it?
By this point the show has moved away from cryptozoology and into the world of myth and magic. One thing it does stress, however, and that’s the fact that there has never been a documented attack on a human. The Howler is scary, but it doesn’t appear to be dangerous.
There is one possible exception to this. That’s the concept of the “death stare” and the idea that the Howler is a harbinger of death. Like the banshee, if it howls for you, you’re fated to die. But that’s a minor part of the whole story. Mostly, the Howler is a cry in the night and a shadow in the woods. The rest is in the minds of the humans who hear and glimpse it.
“Witchcraft was a frequent practice among the colonists.”
It really was not. Accusing people of witchcraft was a frequent practice among the religious colonies. The actual practice thereof was virtually unheard-of, because of the aforementioned religious inclinations of the colonists in those areas. You got granny-women and herbwives, but calling them witches would get you a smack about the earhole: they were (and indeed are) good Christians, thank you, who use Christian prayer alongside herbal remedies as an essential part of their practice. There was never anybody in the US who could reasonably be called a witch until the neoPagan revival of the mid-20th.
Thanks for the cultural note. I was quoting the episode’s narration. I did not say it was accurate.
On the one hand, I agree that the quoted statement overclaims wildly (whomever one attributes it to, and I will note that on my first pass through the column I misread it the same way you did).
But your last sentence strikes me as going overboard in the opposite direction, although part of the problem revolves around the specific baggage attached to the word “witch” dating from the per- and early colonial “then” to the modern neoPagan “now”. “Witches” as the colonials thought of them were more or less wholly imaginary, and while today’s Wiccans or other neoPagans actually exist, such magick as they may wield has not to date made it outside the very narrow orbits its practitioners travel.
But I’d submit that there certainly were many people on the North American continent at various times in the pre-colonial, colonial, and later periods of North American history who were practitioners of shamanistic rituals, esoteric spiritual traditions, and a variety of herbal and other medicine-craft. They fall into two broad categories: slaves imported wholesale from Africa and elsewhere, and the many localized indigenous populations scattered across the North and Central American landscape. The trouble is that what we know – or think we know – about traditions such as “voodoo”/”voudoun” and about indigenous tribal medicine traditions* is extremely scattershot and often of highly uncertain reliability. (Recall that a lot of our first-contact encounters with indigenous cultures were conducted by missionaries and conquistadors who were deliberately trying to overwrite local belief systems…and by the time researchers started trying to document and preserve pre-contact traditions, a lot of that knowledge had died from European diseases, gone deeply underground, and/or had flat-out been lost for lack of anyone for tribal elders to hand it down to.)
*I distinguish here between medicine traditions (which I will define as matters of spiritual practice, herbal and other medical lore, and explicitly magickal principle and practice) and folklore/mythology (that is, the story-traditions ranging from creation myths to tales of animal-people and other beings from the “before time”). We have quite a lot of the latter sort of material, but much less of the former…and a non-trivial percentage of the medicine/spiritual lore is colored by language and traditions the indigenous peoples got from us.
Medicine men, Mambos/Houngans, shamans, magi, Kabbalists and assorted other members of non-European magical traditions aren’t witches, and will be as offended as granny-women if you call them that.
[Hopefully, this won’t double-post; the comment engine continues to dislike posts that take more than five minutes or so to type and edit.]
I had meant to get back to this much sooner, but the past week slipped away from me.
I don’t think our views are all that far apart – none of us in present company are inclined to try and explain the Howler via anyone’s definition of “witch” or “witchcraft”. That’s simply the wording the TV show picked and (mis)used to extrapolate its hypothetical history. My point above was simply that if one were trying to explain the Howler as a supernatural entity, there were a variety of traditions and believers/practitioners present in North America (from pre-contact up through colonial and United States history) from which such explanations could be extrapolated.
Where the words “witch” and “witchcraft” are concerned, for my own part I hesitate to use either term nowadays to describe almost any living or historically documented person or practice. The words have acquired so much contradictory baggage from all manner of sources (not least among them the Marvel and Archie Comics multiverses), that to me, it’s safest to limit their use to those fantasy or mythic contexts in which characters and cultures self-identify as witches. It’s akin to the way modern American English usage now largely avoids the word “Indians” in favor of “indigenous peoples”, “First Peoples”, or a specific localized population (Cherokee, Iroquois, Salish, etc.).
[I should add here that to my personal knowledge, I’m not in regular contact with anyone whom I know to self-identify specifically as a “witch”. There may well be people in my broader social networks, both online and in realspace, who do so, but if so the subject hasn’t come up in the course of our interactions. If and when that situation changes, I would certainly respect an individual’s preferences as to how they’d want to be addressed and/or referred to.]
“Leopards are native to Africa. “
Oh, much wider distribution than that – in fact, it’s got the largest range of any of the big cats, very prevalent in Asia and not unknown in Israel and Iran.