BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… OUR VERY OWN OZARK HOWLER The phone rang and I answered, made curious by the California area code. “Is this Joshua with StateotheOzarks?” Yes, it is. “Are you familiar with Ozarks lore? Yes, I am. “Can you get us in touch with someone who has seen the Ozark Howler?” Wait, what?

It was 2012 and the caller was an assistant producer from LA. The goal? To produce a TV episode about the Ozark Howler. I was taken aback. My knowledge of the Howler was from a list of fantastic beasts in a hillbilly tourist book I had picked up several years prior. Familiar with the list? Yes. Expecting someone to credibly ask me to help them track down one of the critters from that list? Unexpected. It would have made as much sense to me had the woman from California asked if I could find her a Jackalope.

Fantastic beasts of the Ozarks are plentiful. There’s the Jimplicute (a ghostly dinosaur), the Sidehill Hoofer (mountain antelope with legs shorter on one side than the other), the Gollywampus (a giant amphibian), and even the Galoopus (which lays square eggs), at least according to Will Townsend’s book “Ozarks Tall Tales,”originally published in 1979. Eclipsing the Howler, my favorite has always been the Snawfus, a magical white deer which lives high in the treetops and has blooming dogwood branches for antlers. The Snawfus likes to surprise loggers by sneezing loudly at midnight.

So you can imagine my surprise when I was asked to track down one of these critters by apparently professional adults. That said, following up on leads about things which howl in the Ozark Mountains isn’t terribly difficult. We have coyotes, bobcats, and likely mountain lions, in addition to the occasionally bugling elk and the high-keening red-tailed hawk. So, for unsuspecting city folk, the “legend of the thing that howls” isn’t too hard to manage in real time.

Just the same, the meta-phenomena of the Ozark Howler surprised me. In the intervening years, the Howler has become “the” critter of the Ozarks, spawning websites, blog posts, TV episodes, books, and a myriad of fans, in a way not dissimilar to the Loch Ness Monster, Mothman, or Bigfoot. But finding the point where reality and lore intersect? That one is harder to pin down.

Hillbilly Ozarks culture in the 20th century is a funny critter itself. Back in the 1930s — when the overreaching “Land of a Million Smiles” tourist campaign hit the big time — lots of touristy city folk drove into our mountain interior looking for real-life hillbillies. Said real-life hillbillies were often happy to oblige, selling a simulacrum of their lives, swearing that the fiction was indeed the real. And in time, the fake became real, the real became fake, and the line between rustic pioneer culture and tourist pastiche was blurred. A big part of that blurring was the telling of tall tales which brings us back to Townsend’s Howler and Jimplicute and Gollywampus, and the tradition of telling yarns bigger and bigger just to see if gullibly smart city folk would fall for it.

Beneath the tall tales, however, is the reality that early American settlement in the Ozarks was a dangerous endeavor indeed. Stories abound of wild panthers (“painters”) stalking families and livestock alike. In our exceedingly tamed land, it is difficult to envision a world in which apex predators hunted humans and the nearest help was some 200 miles or more away. This land was unsettled, forbidding. At night, panthers indeed screamed in the dark. It is little wonder that tales were told of Ozark Howlers, fearsome beasts lurking in the just beyond.

And so, the Howler continues to live on, one-part folkloric fantastic beast, one-part specimen of cryptozoology, with folks wondering if a great bearcat with ram’s horns will turn up for dissection one of these days. If such were to happen, it would be a sad day; yet another fierce moment of enchantment reduced to a short headline and an autopsy. Some things are better left to the imagination and heart, a reminder of the wilds in the dark, a reminder that there is magic and danger larger than us, a call to the wilds and humility simultaneously. And perhaps that’s the real allure of our very own Ozark Howler.

— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks

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