Dickson County, a mostly rural stretch of middle Tennessee, is known for being where “Ernest Goes to Camp” was filmed. In the late 1980s, the slapstick silliness of the first Ernest P. Worrell movie grossed upwards of $20 million at the box office.
In that movie, Ernest starts both deliberate and inadvertent fires. But around the county’s real-life campfires, people tell passed-down tales of two local cryptids — one a werewolf and the other the White Bluff Screamer. Eric Freeman Sims, a cryptid and paranormal expert from a neighboring county, has documented both stories in his book “Small Town Haunts and Legends of Tennessee,” and ”The Unseen Paranormal Podcast.”
The werewolf lore, as Eric tells it, started with a circus train wreck in the 1860s.
“They rounded up all the animals,” he said. “But two of the creatures that were missing were never found.”
These creatures were described as half-man and half-wolf. In the coming years, a farmer rushed into town to report a deadly attack from just such a lycanthrope.
“They got a posse together, like you see in movies,” Eric went on. “They took a goat with them to use as bait.”
As soon as they heard the beast crashing through the brush, they opened fire. When the cloud of gunpowder smoke cleared, the goat and two members of the posse were gone. So the townspeople resorted to pooling their money to hire the most-feared big game hunter in the area.
“He hunted the werewolf and tracked this thing for two days and two nights,” Eric said. “He decided to go into the cabin and try to lure it in, then it tried to burst into the front door of the cabin. The hunter climbs up into the rafters and repeatedly shoots every piece of ammo that he’s got into this creature, and it does not phase it.”
You can probably predict the rest: When the sun came up, the werewolf had already disappeared without a trace.
“For many years afterwards, people claimed to see it in the woods,” Eric noted. “But there was never any more reports of it stalking or hunting people.”
Even if the werewolf had turned pacifist, just a few miles away, the White Bluff Screamer would terrorize a family farming along Trace Creek in the early 1900s. Every night, its wailing battered their cabin.
“Of course, it scares the wife and the children,” Eric said. “It scares the father, too. He just won’t admit it.”
One night, the father decided he’d had enough and took his hunting dog to search for the source of the screaming.
“As he would get closer, the screaming would get further away,” Eric said. “So he ended up following it all night. The sun comes up the next morning, and the screaming stops. What he realizes is that the screaming had led him in one big circle back to his cabin. He runs in to find his entire family slaughtered.”
The Screamer apparently took no more lives, but some say that she stuck around and came to be known as a sort of banshee who shrieks her warning to those who encounter her on Trace Creek Road, including Eric’s kin.
“Two of my younger cousins had been walking up that road at night,” he recalled. “They saw a glowing woman in white at the top of the hill. They turned around and ran back down to their house and didn’t go any further.”
I wanted to see where these tales took place for myself, so I invited my local friend, Lauren Beihoffer, to join me. Since she’s survived the TV show “Naked and Afraid,” I figured she could handle it.
Despite living near Dickson County for years, she knew very little about these stories. I informed her that we’d start our hunt at the origin point of the werewolf story — the site of the circus train wreck.
When we reached the train tracks, I instructed Lauren to search for any evidence of beastly hair, sounds and smells.
“It’s actually very clean as far as train tracks go,” Lauren observed. “I feel like they’ve come in here and cleaned everything up and probably removed all traces. It seems so pristine.”
Given the wreck happened in the 1860s, I agreed that that was probably a reasonable assumption.
That’s when we stumbled upon what we declared a smoking gun: a Slurpee straw. I pointed out that, clearly, someone had satisfied their thirst there.
“It could have been a man, it could have been a dog, or it could have been a dog man,” I reasoned.
Then we drove up the road to search for Trace Creek and the site of the Screamer attack.
We parked and walked along the side of the road until we found flowing water, and I asked Lauren if she felt the ruin of the house.
“I mean, it’s a little spooky out here,” she replied.
It felt like we were on the cusp of a Screamer encounter. And would you believe that every bit of audio we recorded after that mysteriously disappeared?
“What an interesting time for the audio to cut out, right when things kind of got real,” Lauren said when we debriefed later. “Definitely, I’m a little bit hypervigilant now.”
As we made s’mores around our own campfire after our hunt, she heard an unidentifiable call in the distance.
That got us talking about the theory that either tale could’ve been inspired by the eerie yowl of a bobcat or the caterwaul of a mountain lion.
And there’s an especially curious animal theory that made even Eric, the cryptid buff, chuckle when he shared it with me.
“Back in the 1800s, most people (had) never seen a llama,” he said. “Some people even think that with the train derailment, that is the explanation. You see an alpaca or a white llama walk around the woods, and they make kind of a screaming noise.”
Even without definitive answers, I came away satisfied. We’d gotten to share in the folklore process, taking in local tales, visiting their rural settings, adding a bit of our own embroidery and passing them on to you as storytellers have done for generations.
This story is part of our series seeking out answers about the region’s cryptids, “What Lurks Beyond the Porch Light.” It was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU Public Radio in Kentucky, and NPR. Sign up for the weekly Porch Light newsletter here for news from around the region.