Alabama Has Some Crazy Monster Stories

When you think about Alababam, most think of NASCAR, sweet tea, and college football. But what about bigfoot, the wolf woman, and giant fish?

Giant cats and other creatures

In one scene of "I Was Bitten," Daniel references rumors from about a year ago of pets in Trussville being attacked by some kind of giant cat. Residents wondered if it was a black panther or some other kind of large cat. State wildlife officials said that's unlikely: There are no confirmed large cats, especially panthers, in Alabama.

The cat rumors aren't limited to Trussville. In Walker and Winston counties, there are rumors of mythical big cats, whether they go by the name of the Wampus Cat, the Swamp Cat or the Sipsey Creature.

Another creature often described as either like a big cat or a Bigfoot is the Alabama White Thing (or White Thang). The White Thing has at least been sighted near Walker County, in Winston County.

The sightings, sometime in the late '30s, were of an animal that looked like something between a dog and a lion, with long, white hair and a slick tail, with a bush of hair at the end, Peter J. Gossett wrote on freestateofwinston.org.

Legends are full of half-human beings, and Mobile had a particularly interesting one in 1971. Dozens of peopled called the Press Register to report seeing something that looked like half woman and half wolf. The sightings all happened in April of that year, and there haven't been reports of the Wolf Woman of Mobile since.

Big fish

Nobody has ever bothered to tell a story about a small fish, and even if they saw a normal-sized fish, it always appears to be the size of a truck in the retelling. That said, there have been some rumors of pretty big fish in Walker County and elsewhere in Alabama.

News staff writer Mike Bolton wrote in 2008 of a big fish story from Walker County Lake, a tale of a 150-pound catfish, big enough to fit a child's head in its mouth. The man who saw it, John Beal of Sumiton, said he saw it with another catfish in its mouth.

When biologists caught the beast, it weighed in at just 55 pounds.

But monsters in the water aren't limited to big catfish. An 1877 story from The Gadsden Times, reprinted in The New York Times, tells of a group of settlers along the Coosa River in St. Clair County in 1816 or 1817 who killed a massive snakelike creature in the river the color of a catfish but much bigger.

When they shot the creature and cut it open, they found inside it the remains of a deer, a canoe and a man.

For the full article, click here.