A ‘Wild Man’ Once Haunted Holston Mountain

When a Mrs. Cardwell went one morning to her smoke house in the backyard of her Jacob’s Creek home to get bacon for breakfast, she got more than bacon – she got the scare of her life.
She had barely reached the meat bench when there suddenly sprang from behind it what she called “the most horrible creature of a man she had ever seen.”
He was very large, tall, had long shaggy hair and a beard, fiery eyes, very large white teeth, extra-large hands with dagger-like fingernails and was completely nude.
He jumped across the bench and over her as she fainted and fell to the floor. Her husband, who was on the back porch, saw him flee up the mountainside and into the woods.
This hair-raising encounter of late December 1873 was the beginning of many tales of sightings of the legendary “wild man” of Holston Mountain.
In the late winter of 1874, a woman who lived near the head of Sharp’s Creek went into the early dawning to a barn to milk her cow.
She found the “wild man” there suckling the cow already. She immediately surrendered her rights to the milk and went screaming to the house. She would never go to the barn alone after that.
A year or two later, some ladies went berry pickin’ on the high slopes of Holston Mountain. When they arrived at the berry patch, the dreaded “wild man” was already there picking berries. They gave him no competition. In record time, they arrived back home with empty buckets.
On a snowy morning in 1879, a family arose to find barefoot human tracks all around their home. There was evidence that he had tried to open the front door, and he had approached several windows.
That explained why the family dog had barked most of the night.
Once, he quickly emptied a one-room school when he suddenly appeared at the only door. The students and teacher fled through the open windows.
Though a very fearsome sight, he was never known to hurt anyone. Some may have been hurt fleeing from him.
One time, a well-known circus sent several men into the woods to try and catch him and make a sideshow of him. Though they had several sightings of him, they could never make a successful capture.
His range seems to have been not only a wide expanse of Holston Mountain, but there were occasional sightings of him along Holston River and far up in Shady Valley. Once, he was seen in a Holston Valley field eating the raw corn.
He may have served two beneficial purposes.
Sometimes, parents brought unruly children into line by telling them that the “wild man” would get them if they didn’t behave. And more than once, moonshiners circulated scary tales about him in an effort to keep people away from their still sites in secluded hollows.
In January 1887, some youths living near the head of Jacob’s Creek, were tracking rabbits in a new fallen snow. They came upon the body of the “wild man” lying face downward in deep snow at the base of a cliff. It appeared that he had been running late in the night and had fallen over the cliff. He was buried where he fell.
Thus ended the saga of the Wild Man of Holston Mountain, or did it?
There have been numerous reports of his ghost appearing, even in recent years.
Around 1900, an old ex-slave living in Bristol may have solved the mystery. He finally told that in 1872, Big Elbert who had been a slave of Dr. B.F. Zimmerman, Bristol’s first doctor, was caught supposedly raping a white woman.
Knowing that he would certainly be lynched if he were caught, he managed to flee, and he had told this old ex-slave that he was going to run to the Holston Mountains never to be back in Bristol again. He had made the statement that living in the wild would be far better than being lynched.
It was widely believed that Big Elbert did indeed become the legendary “Wild Man of Holston Mountain.”

BUD PHILLIPS is a local historian and author. He can be reached at (276) 466-6435.