From the Butterfly Man to the Wampus, including the Mocking Crows, the Grafton Monster and the Flatwoods Monster, Appalachia is full of supernatural creatures. There are countless stories on TikTok with the hashtag #HauntedAppalachia. And many people believe that the high number of mysterious phenomena observed in the Appalachian Mountains, a mountain range that stretches more than 3,200 km from Newfoundland, Canada, to northern Alabama, USA, is explained by their geological age can.
“How old are these mountains?” “, you will ask me. They are older than the rings of Saturn, the ozone layer or organisms that reproduce sexually. They are old enough to have experienced days on Earth lasting less than 24 hours. These rocks were formed almost 1.2 billion years ago, when all the continents were one.
“About 750 million years ago, due to the expansion of the continental crust, this supercontinent began to elongate and break up like hot carambras. » With these eloquent words Sandra HB Clark, a geological researcher with the US Geological Survey, described the formation of the southern Appalachians. After the continent was dismembered, a deep basin stretching from North and South Carolina to Georgia filled with seawater. The rest of the mountain range disappeared and became the Scottish Highlands.
Over the next million years, sediments accumulated at the bottom of the basin under the action of rivers, while eruptions from neighboring volcanoes followed each other. Then the continents decided to change course: they collided and overlapped each other, causing earthquakes and eruptions of molten rock. The intensity and unpredictability of these events have helped to form an incredibly unique mountain range whose topography does not allow agriculture but is home to unprecedented ecological diversity.
According to Elizabeth A. Byers, an ecologist specializing in the Appalachian Mountains, this topography creates “a variety of ecological niches with varying elevation, slope, orientation, temperature, and precipitation.” These niches were slowly populated with species that were particularly adapted to their environment. “
In some areas, species have had tens of millions of years to migrate and specialize, and so they “completely occupy each ecological niche.”
The ecologist, who is also chief scientist at Appalachian Ecology, an environmental consulting firm, says it is possible to “hike through forests and wetlands and find unusual species of rare or incredible beauty.” fascinating. What could be better than encountering a carnivorous round-leaved sundew, its red tentacles covered in sticky nectar? Or discover the small holes dug the night before by a large flying squirrel that came down from a tree to eat fake truffles? »
If supernatural legends are commonplace in the region, it’s not just because of the age of the mountains; This is also because they are incredibly well preserved. Because the Appalachians are largely uninhabited by humans, ancient biodiversity is still largely preserved, explains Elizabeth A. Byers. “Some of the great habitats that still exist include the dark, misty Norway spruce forests, oak forests, silver maple swamps along major waterways and upland cottongrass swamps.”
Are there monsters among the ancient species that still inhabit these ecological niches? It’s fun to imagine and often quite easy. “These mountains, because of their age, are the ideal breeding ground for all kinds of horrors,” recognizes Ursula Vernon, a North Carolina-based bestselling author who writes under the pseudonym T. Kingfisher and whose goosebump-inducing horror novels are primarily set in Appalachia.
“The mountains have eroded and twisted. They are full of dark valleys and deep furrows in the earth,” emphasizes the author. “Sometimes their age is quite depressing.”
The number of legends is closely linked to the wildness of the place, which goes beyond what most of us know. In the Appalachian Mountains, “it’s easy to be intimidated by the grandeur of nature because of the ubiquity of the natural landscape,” says Carl Lindahl, a renowned folklorist who teaches at the University of Houston.
He discusses the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning psychiatrist Robert Coles, in which he asked children to draw their houses: “For those who live in Appalachia, and for them only, the house was the natural landscape,” says Carl . Lindahl. The children drew houses “in the shadow of nature”. Some of them only drew mountains and forests, showing the importance of nature in the Appalachians.
“There is something about this landscape that humbles you and implies that there is something much larger than us and that this thing is incredibly powerful,” the folklorist continues. “Nature is a door to the supernatural. Without nature, the supernatural does not exist.
Myths and legends have long been a way to explain the inexplicable in nature. The locations became elements of the creation of supernatural settings that were once steeped in legend. In Iceland, such places are called álagabletir, which translates to “enchanted places” in English.
Although the concept of language did not exist when the Appalachian Mountains emerged, these mountains have been the focus of many stories for as long as humans have existed. In particular, the mountain range contains the Judaculla Stone, a 22 m² soapstone rock covered with more than 1,500 petroglyphs, the oldest of which are around 4,000 years old. In Cherokee mythology, the region where the stone is located is the domain of the Lord of the Wild, a giant who haunts the place to protect it from overhunting.
As this legend shows, stories don’t just scare us; They sometimes have a deeper purpose. Leslie J. Anderson, an Ohio-based horror poet and author and co-host of The Cryptonaturalist podcast, which she co-hosts with her husband Jarod, believes that scary stories are a great way to capture people’s attention excite to warn them of danger.
“I don’t want to tell my youngest that he can’t play near the cliff because he might fall and die. But we can have fun telling him that gremlins will bite his toes if he gets too close to the edge,” she jokes. “We often forget how dangerous forests, cliffs and swamps are.”
In their opinion, saying “Be careful of the werewolf” has a greater impact than “Be careful.”
It may also be that we have attributed so many legends to the Appalachians for the simple reason that these mountains witnessed the development of most life forms on Earth. Shadows and the sound of the woods naturally inspire fear, especially for those who are not used to it. For those who know the area, however, the mountains inspire something completely different.
“The Appalachian Mountains, with their countless valleys, their slopes covered in dense vegetation, and their springs that spring from nowhere and then disappear again, form a very mysterious landscape. “It is a place where the devil can wander, where you can get lost following strange lights, where you can come across something that looks like a deer but doesn’t move like that,” explains Ursula Vernon. “These mountains create fear. But people have to live there, so we have stories that tell you what to do if you encounter the devil or the non-deer (deer-like cryptid), or that warn you about what will happen to you if Don’t do it. Things are not good. What is certain is that it is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for storytellers.”