Cherokee legend tells of a young woman named Running Deer who once defeated an evil spirit, called Ew’ah, that she believed was responsible for driving her husband insane. Running Deer drew strength from the spirit of a mythical mountain cat but was afterward relegated to the deep woods and remote mountain passes of North Carolina, where she terrorized and drove insane anyone unfortunate enough to glimpse her.
Another legend has Running Deer as a young shape-shifter who slayed a catlike demon and became her tribe’s spirit protector.
This is likely how the wampus cat of lore was born in the Appalachian Mountains, probably in East Tennessee or western North Carolina. And that’s why all wampus cats—including those on the gridiron in Texas—have a Cherokee lineage.
Appalachian settlers took the story from there and anglicized Ew’ah into a wampus cat, which likely derives from the 1840s slang term “catawampus” or, as some prefer, “cattywampus.”
If something was cattywampus, it was peculiar or frightening (likely influenced by the term “catamount,” another word for a cougar), and the wampus cat of lore can be as peculiar as a storyteller wants it to be. In some accounts, it has six legs (two for walking, four for fighting), walks upright and swims like a mink.
It didn’t take long for the wampus cat to become the subject of stories designed to scare children into doing as they were told.
“Parents are telling us that they are experiencing less trouble keeping their children in after dark since the report gained circulation that the Wampus had been seen here,” The Greeneville Daily Sun in Tennessee reported in 1918.
The wampus cat began showing up in Texas newspapers in the early 1900s, most notably as the subject of a series of stories by frontier journalist and historian Don Hampton Biggers in a satirical Rotan newspaper called Billy Goat Always Buttin’ In. Biggers had come to the small town northwest of Abilene in 1907 to establish a respectable weekly paper, but he published satire on the side as “a journal of such things as the editor takes a notion to write.”
When he needed to fill space in the paper, Biggers spun a series of yarns about the wampus cat, which he called “a cross between a wildcat, badger and a lobo wolf, with fangs 2 inches long and claws that could peel the bark off of a mesquite tree.”
The locals knew it was a hoax, but visitors to the region often left Rotan dreading an encounter with the wampus cat of Biggers’ imagination.
Biggers’ son, Earl Biggers, in a 1961 interview with historian and scholar Seymour V. Connor, said his father came up with most of the wampus cat tales at the Rotan barber shop, where he and his pals would concoct outlandish stories.
In 1908, the same year Biggers was chronicling the creature’s depredations in Fisher County, The Houston Post chronicled the game-by-game results of a local baseball team called the Wampus Cats. Since then, a number of schools have chosen the wampus cat as a mascot, including Itasca High School here in Texas.
As with descriptions of the cat itself, there is more than one story about how Itasca, which is between Fort Worth and Waco, chose the beast as its mascot.
A 1996 newspaper story quoted lifelong Itascan Nancy Bowman, who ran the school’s special services, as saying that in the 1920s the high school team was having trouble finding a nickname. During a raucous postgame locker room celebration, a player shouted, “Wow, we were really wampus cats tonight!” Itasca had its mascot.
A Dallas radio station has called the wampus cat “the most quintessential Texas high school football mascot,” but it’s not uniquely Texan. Schools in Conway, Arkansas; Atoka, Oklahoma; Leesville, Louisiana; and as far north as Clark Fork, Idaho, have also adopted the mythical creature as a mascot.
In 2003, a collegiate wood-bat baseball team in Albemarle, North Carolina, brought the creature closer to home. The Uwharrie Wampus Cats square off against the likes of the Carolina Disco Turkeys and the Boone Bigfoots.
Biggers and the other Rotan barbershop regulars would be delighted to know the creature they helped create has come full circle.