The Ozark Howler

Deep in the Ozarks of southern Missouri and Arkansas, the story goes, prowls the Ozark Howler, a bear-sized black cat with glowing eyes, shaggy hair and horns, whose cry is a mix of a wolf’s howl and an elk’s bugle. It is a modern piece of hill-country folklore with a whiff of hoax about it (some say cryptozoologists were baited with it), but it fits a long tradition of “devil cat” tales across the South. The Ozarks it haunts are real, deep, dark forest. Told as the folklore it is.