It’s as big as a bear, with black, shaggy hair, a long tail and horns.  It lives in the Ozark Mountains, where it’s rarely seen.  However legends tell of its distinctive howl, which is where it gets its name. 

In the immortal words of surprised owl: O rly?

It’s not that I’m a skeptic.  But I grew up in the Ozarks two miles off a paved road, as a member of the fourth generation to live on a family farm nestled up against the Ozark National Forest.  So when I hear tales that start out “Ozark locals say,” I expect to hear something from back home.  

Storytelling in the Ozarks is an art form that is highly developed.  Probably because television, telephones, radio and the internet were slow to reach those areas.  Over the years, I’ve heard of Bigfoot, the Arkansas Fouke Monster, the ghosts at the Crescent Hotel, and the Gurdon light.  But I’ve never heard of an Ozarks Howler.

Then while looking for paranormal story ideas one day, I stumbled across the howler “legend.”  Most of the information that I could find was thin: usually a line or two about big, panther like animals that “all the locals say” terrify hunters and stalk the Ozark night. 

I wondered if maybe this "Ozarks Howler" was some kind of perversion of the Cherokee stories of the wampus cat but the descriptions of the animals didn't match. 

With so little to go on, I filed the information away until my next trip back to the family farm.

  My plan was to ask my dad if he had heard of the howler, or if my grandpa had ever mentioned it. 

But before I could dig further, I stumbled across a post on Cryptomundo.com that may explain why I’ve never heard of the howler before now.  According to the article’s author, Loren Coleman, the howler is nothing but a hoax.  Coleman writes that the tales of the Ozark Howler began appearing on the internet about 1998.  Several different websites and research groups popped up.   Veterans among the cryptid community were wary.  

Eventually, Coleman was called by the editor of Strange Magazine to investigate “Jonathan C. Cook,” a person claiming to be writing an article about the howler for them.  Loren said that he found that many of the websites were the work of “Cook” and that the people who claimed to have seen the howler were sock puppets. 

“He thought it would be fun to undermine the credibility of monster tales like Bigfoot and the chupa,(The Chupacabra, another regional cryptid.)” Coleman wrote in his article.

So where do I stand on all this?  Do I believe that somewhere out there in the woods surrounding my childhood home, there is some kind of bear-sized cat that makes strange, howling noises at night?  Based on my own experiences, I believe Coleman’s assertion that the Ozarks Howler is a hoax. 

There are enough genuine unexplained phenomena floating around out there without adding a fabricated one to the mix.