Wampus Cats and Haints!

The longer you read this blog, the more you will hear and see quotes from the Knoxville News Sentinel’s funny columnist, Sam Venable. He cracks me up and he always has something funny to say about our superstitions and the good ol’ timey rumors in this neck of the woods.

In a recent edition of the paper, Venable wrote about the move of the UT dairy farm from its present location on the UT campus, and the column “elicited a funny remembrance from Bill Simpson, who worked at UT’s agricultural complex 1950-65.” The story took place in an old barn down close to the river and it is a lol (laugh out loud) story.

It was Simpson’s job every morning to climb to the top of the barn and clean out a “light trap” to recover one species of moth. He said, “the zoology department also had a complete cow skeleton stored in the hay loft, the critter standing on a big pedestal.”

One of the co-workers Simpson worked with was a believer in “wampus cats” and other East Tennessee “haints”, and it was just too natural that Simpson and a buddy should conspire to bring the scary critter to life.

“A buddy and I ran twine from the foreleg of the skeleton, down the bones and between the loft boards, unplugged the light trap, then covered our twine tracks with loose hay.

“We took the wampus cat believer with us the next morning, and when we noticed the ‘light was out’, we left him in the loft while we went to ‘check the fuses’.

“Of course, we started pulling on our hidden twine, and the skeleton began pawing the pedestal.

“We heard three or four giant steps on the loft floor, then a crash outside. The guy had jumped out of the loft down to the ground! Fortunately he was unhurt, but he did have to change his underwear.

“Every time I go by the farm, I remember how nice the fields always looked and how nice it was down there among the corn and the cows. But I also start hee-hawing when I remember the ‘Wampus Cow’.”