Cryptid Corner: Beast of Bladenboro

Some cryptids appear briefly, spook a few townsfolk, and then melt quietly back into the night. Other cryptids, like the Beast of Bladenboro, crash onto the scene with astonishing violence.

In January 1954 in the town of Bladenboro, North Carolina, three dogs were discovered with their skulls crushed flat and tongues chewed out. But it wasn't until somebody cut open the poor canines that they discovered something even more disturbing. According to the Robesonian newspaper, Police Chief Roy Fores explained that the dogs had been almost completely exsanguinated. The same word popped into everybody's head at this revelation, but Fores was the first to use it on record: vampire. He immediately tried to drain the terror from the word, though, adding: “The vampire is probably a mad wolf.”

Posses were formed to support Fores as he searched the swamplands on the edge of town for what the newspapers variously called a “vampire beast” or “vampire killer” or the “bleeder beast of Bladenboro.” None of those hunting parties could find the creature. Somehow, though, many of the dogs in town did.

Over the course of the next month, up to a dozen dogs were killed, some decapitated, some drained of blood, and others mauled. Footprints in the snow included long, heavy claw marks, and people started seeing a darkcoated, cat-faced creature between three and five feet long and between 90 and 150 pounds, the size of a large dog. The beast's cry sounded like that of a baby or a woman in distress, but of a timbre that communicated in no uncertain terms that its source was not human.

About a thousand hunters came from miles around to bag the beast, outnumbering the local residents by a good couple hundred. The hunters even brought dogs as bait. For one dog, it worked too well, as it was dragged off into the swamp by the creature within earshot of a hunting party that was powerless to stop it. Newspapers reported that Bladenboro had turned into a carnival, although probably not the kind of carnival you want

to bring your kids to. Many hypothesized about the types of large cats that the beast could be—panther, lynx, bobcat, catamount, mountain lion—but none of these animals quite fit the profile. Those types of cats were either extremely rare in Bladenboro or weren't so violently confrontational. One veterinarian posited that it might not be a cat at all, but an escaped watchdog on a bloodlust-fueled killing spree.

Some found humor in the situation. The News and Observer quotes an unnamed man as saying, “Before the beast came, my wife and I had twin beds.” And the local theater owner (who was also the mayor) made sure not only to run The Big Cat, a 1949 action movie about a puma, but to take out a newspaper ad about it that read:

now you can see the ‘cat'!

we've got him on our screen!

in technicolor too!

Its first attack on a human was on January 5 at eight p.m. Mrs. C. E. Kinlaw was outside her house investigating some whimpering dogs. She saw the creature, which she described as a “big mountain lion.” It charged at her. She screamed. It stalled in its tracks, and, as her husband dashed outside, it ran off. They examined its tracks later and learned something newly disturbing: there were two sets. The Asheville Citizen-Times paper

summarized the discovery succinctly as: “the vampire may have a mate.”

There were two Beasts of Bladenboro out there.

Eventually, all those hunters in town became annoying and dangerous, so Officer Flores called off the grand hunt. Newspapers announced it with

the headline, VAMPIRE BEAST WINS BATTLE OF BLADENBORO. Not long after, a thirty-five-pound bobcat was killed, as was a similarly sized “leopard-like” animal that some claimed was an ocelot. People touted one or both of those animals as the Beast. When pigs and chickens were violently killed in the ensuing days, others took that as proof that the Beast was still out there. By the end of January, there were no more sightings of the beast, although for the rest of the year, any time livestock were killed, people wondered if it had returned.

So was it a bobcat or ocelot after all? Maybe. But one thing is for sure: Bladenboro doesn't celebrate a Bobcat Fest every year. It celebrates a Beast Fest. In 2009, Bladenboro kicked off an annual celebration of the mysterious animal. Every fall, 8,000 people converge on this town of less than 2,000 to listen to music, eat food, wear costumes, participate in carnival activities, and get a picture with the festival mascot, a person costumed as the Beast of Bladenboro, which they affectionately call B.O.B.