Episode 3: The White Bluff Screamer and Werewolf Springs

Just what are people seeing and hearing in the woods around Montgomery Bell State Park near White Bluff? Eyewitness accounts have reported seeing and hearing the eerie wailing of the White Bluff Screamer. Join me as we discuss the legends from Dickson County.

Transcript

Welcome to the Tennessee Ghosts and Legends Podcast. My name is Lyle Russell. I am your host, and I love a good ghost story. In this episode, we’ll discuss a strange tale out of Dickson County, Tennessee about a murderous creature known as the White Bluff Screamer. 

The Legend:

Near an isolated area known as Trace Creek, not far from where modern-day Highway 47 crosses southwest of Montgomery Bell State Park, there lived a young family whose names are lost to history trying to make their new life in 1920s rural Tennessee. The family had seven children, the oldest being around fourteen and the youngest was six. There was nothing remarkable about them, as the area saw many young families spread to the rural areas of Tennessee at the end of World War I to restart their lives. The patriarch of this family could well have been one of those returning veterans. They built a typical cabin-style home in the bottomlands southeast of White Bluff and planted their crops. All was well with their world—until the screaming started.

The first night was unsettling for the quiet rural farm. The screeching wail echoed throughout their valley. The children and their mother waited silently in their cabin as their father took his lantern around the house to investigate, but nothing was found. He dismissed the noise as some sort of injured animal. However, the following nights, the screaming grew longer, louder, and so frequent that after a week of the disturbance, sleep was impossible for any of them, and the children were terrified of the coming night. When the sun went down, the screams would start anew. Their father, desperate to rid his family of this horrible screaming, sat out on their porch one evening, rifle in hand, and watched as the sun sank over the surrounding hills. When the last light of day extinguished itself, he told his wife to lock the doors and windows, and to only open it for him when he returned. The familiar eerie wailing began almost immediately after dark. He steeled himself, said goodbye to his family, then set out into the dark woods. Tonight, he would find the source of the screams that tormented his family and kill it.

The ceaseless scream pierced his ears as he bounded through the thick brush. The man was determined, though icy chills ran through his body every time the scream started. He was an expert woodsman but struggled to keep his bearings and became lost chasing the screams through the fog. Every time he thought he was getting nearer; the unnerving wail would suddenly move farther away and in different directions. At times he felt he was walking in circles, or, that the screaming was actually encircling him. Was there more than one beast out there taunting him? The horrible sound echoed off the large trees and made tracking the source nearly impossible. He extinguished his light and knelt down trying to pinpoint the direction of the screams. 

“If I can’t find it, I will let it find me,” he said to himself. He crouched and waited.

Suddenly, the horrible wail became mixed with the blood-curdling screams of a woman… and of children. Whatever this thing was, it had found his family. He raced through fog and brush, his heart pounding with every footfall. He cried out for them, but only the terrified screams of his family replied. After what seemed an eternity, he could make out the dim lantern light hanging on his front porch through the fog. He was almost there. Then, the screams abruptly stopped.

The man burst through the cabin door to find a gruesome scene. The eviscerated bodies of his wife and children were strewn about the cabin; their lifeless forms torn to shreds. As he collapsed in horror and disbelief, the eerie wailing started again.

Many versions of the tale do not end there. Some say that after finding his family slain, the man set out again in a murderous rage to hunt down their assailant, only for him to find a ghostly female figure enshrouded in a white mist. The spirit floated through the trees, leaving scorched ground beneath her in a blue, ethereal fire. Another variation says he encountered a great beast with white fur, easily twice the size of a man, with savage claws and teeth. Both of those versions have led paranormal enthusiasts to believe the White Bluff Screamer to be one of two mythical creatures: a Banshee or a cryptid. While no records of a terrible murder like this could be found, locals of White Bluff, Tennessee who keep up with the town’s history, say that this incident happened. Reports say the remains of the man’s cabin are still there, and that the White Bluff Screamer still haunts the area around it. 

So, what could the ‘Screamer’ be? A Banshee, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, is a female supernatural being in Celtic folklore who’s nightly wailing foretells the death of a family member of the person who hears it. Banshees are usually associated with Irish legend, but a version of the banshee exists in Welsh and Scottish lore as well. There are also many stories originating in the United States about banshees, particularly in North Carolina and South Dakota.

For those who believe the Screamer is a cryptid of some sort, Great Smoky Mountains National Park in east Tennessee has a few reported sightings of a Bigfoot-type creature, but that is a fair distance from White Bluff. However, Tennessee is covered in large and heavily forested areas. It is possible there is more than one or that perhaps the creature migrates to different parts of the state. Most of the reported cryptid encounters in Tennessee have a somewhat violent twist to them. If this was indeed a cryptid, the massacre of the family fits the profile.

A different possibility involves another long-standing fable in Dickson County: The Legend of Werewolf Springs. This 1860s tale says a passing circus train either stopped unexpectedly or derailed just outside of Burns Station, Tennessee, and many of the circus animals escaped into the surrounding countryside. Any of the animals that could not be recaptured were left behind. Among the elusive escapees were two men known as the “Wolf Men of Borneo”; a side show act that touted these men as half man and half beast, being able to shapeshift at will. The wolf men were not recaptured and were abandoned to their fate in the Tennessee hills.

Two years after the train incident, a local landowner and one of his foremen were passing through an area called Hall Springs, now called Werewolf Springs unofficially, near Burns Station on their way to a homestead in nearby Beckley. It was almost dark and the road was muddy, so their pace was slow. The foreman kept pestering his boss that he felt like something was stalking them. The man dismissed the notion as cowardice and forced the wagon to push on through the night. Suddenly, a wild howl pierced the twilight and a creature emerged on the road behind them running on all fours. The Foreman whipped the mules to go faster but the creature was gaining on them. In a panic, they abandoned their horses and wagon for the woods, fleeing for their lives in different directions. The landowner crashed through the brush as fast as he could go until he heard another wailing howl and the terrified screams of his foreman back the way he had come. He continued to run in fear. The creature never came for him, so he lived to tell the tale.

When he made it back to Burns, he immediately went to the sheriff, who formed a posse to find the foreman and hunt down this creature. They took a goat for bait and headed to an area near the springs where other reports of a strange animal had been described. They hitched the goat to a tree, split into groups of two, and surrounded the clearing with rifles at the ready. The moon was high, and all was quiet. The nervous men kept a sharp eye out for their prey but saw nothing. Around midnight, just as the sheriff was planning to call off the hunt, an ear-shattering scream split the night and a large, hairy creature entered the clearing moving quickly towards the goat. The muzzle flash of hunting rifles cracked out their report as the men yelled to charge the beast. When they lit their lanterns to see if they’d hit it, the creature was gone, along with the goat and two members of the posse that were never seen again.

It is said that next the sheriff contacted a famed big game hunter to slay this beast and brought the man to a remote cabin near the spring to begin his hunt. After two nights of stalking the springs, the hunter found no sign of the beast and returned to the cabin to rest before his third and final night of hunting. When he woke that evening to prepare, a loud wailing howl echoed across the springs. He saw the beast through the window at the edge of the woods and fired at it from inside the cabin. His shots either missed or hit and angered the beast and it charged the cabin.

The door hinges barely held as the beast slammed against the oak planks. The hunter fired shots through the door but couldn’t tell if he hit it or not. He pushed heavy furniture against the door and window, waiting to see where the creature would try next. At one time, a weak area of the back wall was giving way, but after firing his pistol into the wall, the beast abandoned the idea of coming through it. For hours, the creature tested every part of the cabin for weak points and then seemed to leave when it could not get in. The hunter, having experience with stalking dangerous prey, was not so easily fooled. His ammo was low, so he climbed into the rafters for higher ground, reloaded every weapon he had, and waited. His caution paid off, as a few moments later, the beast returned with a renewed vigor, slamming repeatedly into the door until it finally gave way. It charged into the cabin and the hunter opened fire, hitting the beast multiple times. The beast clawed and scratched to try and get to him, but the hunter climbed too high. The story says the sun peaked over the horizon shortly after, and the creature fled the cabin and into the woods as daylight broke. 

Further to the north and east of Werewolf Springs, a cave was discovered in an area called Creech Hollow where the beast supposedly lived. Another story of a young girl who disappeared while fetching water from the spring is told, and a search party set out to find her. The searchers found both animal and human bones within the cave, but the girl was never found. The lost cave is now at the bottom of Creech Hollow Lake, a man-made reservoir formed when the park opened. Mule and horse bones have also been found around the Werewolf Springs area.

A State Park Ranger who was familiar with the legend found the remains of a cabin site in between Werewolf Springs and nearby Hall family cemetery, all of which is now part of Montgomery Bell State Park. While the story of the hunter and the cabin comes to mind, it was more likely the cabin belonging to the Halls or one of the many other families that made their home within the area before being declared a park. 

Even with a preponderous amount of evidence that the White Bluff Screamer and the beast of Werewolf Springs are myths, many long-time residents of Dickson County around Burns and White Bluff hold on to their claims of having seen and heard the Screamer. They are also open to the notion that the screamer and the beast could be one and the same, roaming the dense woodlands around the park. I have personally camped at Montgomery Bell State Park, both in their beautiful geothermal cabins and a short overnight hike to one of the primitive campsites along the Montgomery Bell Trail. I didn’t make it as far as Werewolf Springs, but I wandered a fair distance into that beautiful wilderness and luckily did not encounter anything resembling the famed beast.

There is also no readily available record of a rail accident involving a circus train. There are rail lines in that area that have followed the same tracks since the mid-1800s, but rail traffic in that time would likely have been troop and munition haulers during the Civil War and not civilian circus trains. That said, there are records of multiple train accidents after the war in that area, though none specifically mention a circus. Many also say that the landowner in the wagon that was stalked by the beast was none other than iron-mining tycoon Montgomery Bell, himself. Yet Bell died in 1855 which is prior to the supposed encounter. 

There are also living members of the Hall family who have given accounts of their childhood growing up around the area of Werewolf Springs, and none of those reports include a creature tormenting their family. However, there are still reports of strange happenings in the woods around White Bluff. In one such account, a hunter at his cabin near the park encountered a cryptid-like creature after cleaning and field dressing his deer. He placed the innards in a washtub for later disposal and hung the deer up for skinning. While taking a break on the porch, the woods became strangely quiet when all the sudden, his hunting dogs bayed and scurried into the cabin in fear; tails tucked as they ran. When he stepped off the porch to investigate, around the corner stepped a monstrous white-haired creature. It went after his hunting dogs first, then the hunter himself. He ran for the cabin and locked himself in, barricading the door as his dogs continued barking and howling at the creature outside. The creature wailed and paced on the porch for a long while before finally giving up, stealing his deer and the wash tub of deer parts. He later found the tub in the nearby woods licked completely clean. 

Did he encounter the famed White Bluff Screamer? Or was it the beast that gives Werewolf Springs its infamous name? Only one thing is for certain: there is something wailing in the woods around White Bluff, Tennessee, and what it is, no one knows.

END

Thank you for listening to today’s Tennessee Ghosts and Legends Podcast episode. I am your host, Lyle Russell, and remember, the dead may seem scary, but it’s the living you should be wary of. Until next time.