Full Moon in the Forest
The Beast of Bladenboro
cryptidchronicles:
The Beast of Bladenboro
In 1954, a savage killer kept a small North Carolina town in a grip of terror. He left big tracks, a bloody trail and a hair-raising legend. Was it a bear? A vampire-cat? To this day, the creature remains a mystery
Bladenboro is a small community surrounded by pine forests and swamps at the southeastern edge of the North Carolina piedmont. It was also the setting for the greatest monster flap North carolina has ever seen.
On December 29, 1953 a local farmer reported a large, cat-like creature had attacked one of his dogs and dragged it into the underbrush. On New Year’s Eve two more dog carcasses, reportedly completely drained of blood, were found. The next day, two more dogs were attacked. Something was hunting animals in Bladenboro.
The two butchers at the Dublin IGA grocery store are a little confused about what exactly “the Beast of Bladenboro” was. A Revolutionary War tale, one says. The other jokes that he knows what it is: His daddy.
Just up N.C. 410, in Bladenboro, a man with a graying five o’clock shadow pays the gas station attendant for a bottle of Sun-Drop. He notices someone not from around town and strikes up a conversation.
“Yeah,” he says of the beast, “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know what it is.”
These folks shouldn’t feel too bad. To this day, nobody really knows what, in 1954, went around killing dogs, goats, hogs and small cows in the most unusual way – breaking their jaws, crushing their heads flat and sucking the blood from their bodies, according to local newspaper reports.
It was downright gruesome. Women and children stayed locked in their homes. Men dared not walk outside without some kind of firearm. Big-game hunters from around the country infiltrated Bladenboro, a town about 60 miles west of Wilmington.
The Beast of Bladenboro was big news then, but today, the story is buried in clumsy rolls of microfiche. Local headlines only give sensational clues: “Mysterious Beast is Still At Large,” “Vampire Tendencies Found In Bladenboro’s ‘Monster,’” and “Guns, Dogs Circle Blood-Lusty Beast.”
Only a few people who experienced the fear are still kicking around Bladenboro. Ask the people at Town Hall if they know anybody who was around when the beast roamed, and you’ll get a pretty good chuckle. But you’ll also get a file of newspaper stories kept in the town vault. And Delane Jackson, town manager, will direct you to Tater Shaw, a man who saw the carnage first-hand.
“Vampire lust”
Shaw lives in a nursing home not too far from Town Hall. On a recent October morning, the 87-year-old man, with his perfectly combed hair and neat long-sleeved gray shirt, sits in the commons area, people using walkers and canes clunking all around him.
“You want to know about the beast?” he says, throwing his hand up as if to shoe away someone. “Oh, you don’t want to talk about that. I’ve told that story before.”
It takes a little encouragement, but before long, he guides his electric wheelchair down the long, waxed linoleum corridor toward his room. You know you’ve reached it when you see a plaque on the door, “Tater’s Place” burnt into the wood.
Inside, bright family portraits and black-and-white World War II navy photos hang on the wall. Shaw glides over to a small table and pulls out a three-ring binder with typed pages out of the drawer. Years ago, a friend of his wrote a screenplay about the beast and based a character on Shaw. He seems quite proud of that.
Then, after shutting the book, Shaw gets comfortable in his wheelchair and says, “It started out one morning.”
Shaw, then the 35-year-old owner of a gas station, had heard about a goat killed on a fellow’s farm out on the edge of town. He’d been told there was something mighty odd about how it died. Curious, he decided to go see for himself.
“His head was flat as a fritter,” he says. “It had a great big ol’ track … It was weird.”
Shaw spreads four fingers of his right hand and places them on his left palm, simulating the size of the paw. Then he looks up and says the beast killed small cows, too, and “two or three” hogs.
Those details are missing from newspaper accounts of the time, though the Wilmington Morning Star (what is now the Star-News) and the Wilmington News, as well as others, thrived off the story for a good part of January 1954.
The stories start Jan. 4, 1954, with the deaths of three dogs, their “skulls crushed in and chewed.” There’s no mention of a goat, but then there’s a lot about this beast that is only uncovered with time.
People were already getting distressed enough to cause Police Chief Roy Fores to go out hunting for the killer with three coonhounds. The “dogs refused to follow the trail.”
Maybe they were smarter than their master. The next day, the chief released a chilling detail. Fores called it the “vampire aspect of the animal.”
The story in the Morning Star on Jan. 5 began, “This nervous town chewed its collective nails today, dreading the pitch of night that might bring a return visit by a mystery killer-beast with vampire lust… (Fores) said a dog found killed last night ‘was opened up today. And there wasn’t more than two or three drops of blood in him.’ In all three cases, the victims’ bottom lip had been broken open and his jawbone smashed back.”
People gettin’ crazy
Shaw remembers the fear. “Everybody was scared,” Shaw said. “Everybody, near ‘bout, that had a gun was carrying it.”
Irrationality began to set in. Locals claimed to have seen the beast, described it, then retracted their statements.
Another resident got trigger happy. He heard his dogs barking one night, looked through a window and saw a shadow. Grabbing his shotgun, he rushed outside, blasting away. On closer inspection, he found his child’s bicycle “crumpled to the ground with the tires in shreds and the seat ripped with buckshot.”
Witness accounts of the beast conflicted. Some said it was about 90 pounds, others said 100 or even 150 pounds. Some claimed it was black, or brown, or tabby, or just “dark in color.” Most people agreed it was a cat, but one veterinarian said it could be a big dog.
The sound is about the only thing people halfway agreed on. They described it as like either a baby or a woman crying, only louder and blood curdling.
“Anyhow, it was getting so bad, it was getting in the newspapers and the radio,” Shaw said. “There came hunters from all over, I mean big hunters.”
At the height of the hunt, according to newspaper accounts, 1,000 men armed with pistols, shotguns and rifles divided into posses and combed about 400 acres of swamp. Some were fraternity boys from UNC Chapel Hill looking for a good time; others were professional hunters accustomed to killing lions and tigers.
Bladenboro only had about 1,000 residents at the time. It only has about 1,700 now. You’d think that if anything was out there, somebody would’ve stepped on it.
Many of these hunters would stop by Shaw’s gas station on their way to the Green Swamp and brag about how they were the ones who were going to kill the beast. Those same men usually stopped back by after the hunt – and always empty-handed.
A friend of Shaw’s, Jabe Frink, also owned a gas station during this time. Frink lives in a brick house just a couple miles from the nursing home. He’s 82 and doesn’t mind talking about beast at all. Frink remembers one group of hunters who brought trained “bear dogs” to turn loose in the swamp. “They said they gonna ‘catch that vampire,’ but they never did,” he said.
Mostly, Frink remembers how terrified everyone was. “It kept snowballing and snowballing. It got so nobody would walk out on the street at night,” he said. “There was a dog that scared that lady on her porch, though.”
Frink is referring to a 21-year-old mother named Mrs. C.E. Kinlaw. She apparently walked out onto her front porch at about 7:30 p.m. January 6, 1954. She was minding her own business when she looked up and saw the “beast” stalking toward her. It was only about 20 feet away, she told the Morning Star.
Kinlaw screamed and ran into the house. Her husband, Charles Kinlaw, grabbed his shotgun and ran outside but only found cat-like paw prints all around his yard.
Everyone’s worst fears seemed to be confirmed. The beast had shown interest in a human.
Not long after that, S.W. Garrett, an experienced hunter from Wilmington, warned women and children to stay indoors. Residents were also advised to keep dogs, “whose nighttime howling reportedly grows more piteous nightly,” locked up indoors.
By Jan. 6, the victim count was up to at least six dogs including one that was dragged into the swamp,never seen again. The next day, the count jumped to seven.
As victims multiplied, town officials became more desperate.
Chief Fores considered tying a few dogs up in the woods as bait but Mayor W.G. Fussell called off.
The mayor may not have had his heart into the project anyway. His day job was owner of a local movie theater and he found a way to capitalize on the beast.
Fussell distributed flyers announcing: “Now you can see the cat. We’ve got him on our screen! And in Technicolor too! The Big Cat, all day Saturday, January 9.”
The day the movie ran, Fussell made another announcement — the hunt was off. The Morning Star headline that day read, “Vampire Beast Wins Battle of Bladenboro.”
The reason for the halt was safety, Fussell said. With so many hunters in the swamp, someone was liable to mistake a man for a beast.
Then, on Jan. 13, it seemed the mystery had come to an end just as quickly as it began. On that day a bobcat was caught in a steel trap, then finished off with a bullet to the brain.
Still, no one was certain this bobcat was the beast, not even Mayor Fussell.
“I just hope this is it,” he told the Morning Star. “If not, I just hope the other one starts down the road and keeps going.”
At home, Frink opens a drawer by his recliner and pulls out three square black-and-white photos. One shows his business partner, Bunny Prevatt, squatting over the cat at their gas station. Another shows Prevatt with a man named Blanco Duvall, holding the beast up by its front legs. The cat’s head only comes up to the man’s waist.
The last photo shows a crowd of people lined up to gawk at the outstretched feline.
“Cars were lined up around the block wanting to see the bobcat,” Frink said.
Seems the beast had the last laugh, though. That cat was barely cold in the grave when another headline ran: “Bladenboro ‘Beast’ Returns from Hiding.”
“I saw the hog,” Frink said. “That was about the last thing that happened.”
So what was the Beast of Bladenboro?
In 2008, the History Channel television series Monster Quest performed an analysis concerning these attacks, which were beginning to happen again, and concluded that the attacker might have been a cougar.
But what about the possibility of the beast being a Lynx? Or a lynx hybrid? The above illustration by Gary Longordo was based on specific features described by local eyewitnesses. Although their range once extended down into the northern portions of the United States, Canadian lynx have only been confirmed in Maine, Montana, Idaho and Washington, but could it be possible that if they show up in the continental U.S. at all, that one could have traveled out farther in search of food? They are twice the size of the southwestern bobcat and can get up to 40lbs.
Whatever the Beast of Bladenboro was, the story lives on as a time when all eyes focused on a usually quiet little town. So far, no one has been able to find any definitive evidence about the existence of the Beast of Bladenboro. Most attacks do not seem consistent with known area predators, so what could be lurking out in North Carolina’s swamps?
Source Credit(s): northcarolinaghosts.com/piedmont/beastofbladenboro.php, © Amy Hotz starnewsonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061029/NEWS/61027007/1051&tc=ar
Top Illustration: A rendering of the beast of Bladenboro © Gary Longordo
Bottom Illustration:John James Audubon (New York, 1785-1851) New York Lynx Canadensis…Canada Lynx, plate XVI, from [The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America,] 1845-1848
Last Photo: Green Swamp Pond in early morning North Carolina © 2009 Kelvin Taylor
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