DATE:          1977

TIME:           Dusk to Dark

LOCATION:   Graham, County North Carolina, Fontana Village, Fontana Dam

TERRAIN:     Mountains, Wooded

OBSERVED:   When I was a young girl we spent our vacations in N.C.  The summer I was 12 we were visiting my cousins who lived in Fontana, NC.  They have a small house with a tin roof right up against a mountainside.  The road only had three houses on it and they are very far apart from each other.

My Mom and one of my cousins, he was about 17 at the time, and I was sitting around the kitchen table about dusk to dark.  When something screamed up on the hillside.  Right over the house.  It was the most terrible sound I have ever heard.  My Mother jumped and I believe I yelled.  We sat just frozen for a moment, then my cousin went and got his father's shotgun.

Something jumped on top of the house and you could hear it walking around for what seemed an eternity.  I was terrified because my Mother was terrified although she continued to tell me it was just a pig or maybe a mountain lion.  A couple of hours later my cousins came home (the parents of the 17 yr old).  And my Mom told them what had happened and they laughed and said it was probably a panther (mountain lion I assume) that they tend to scream a lot.  But my mother grew up in the same mountains and said that it was no panther she ever heard.  My cousin said it was not a panther.  He knew what one sounded like and that was not it.  He never heard anything like it before.  He was so scared he wouldn't go far from the house the whole time we were there. He refused to go into the woods and collect eggs from the henhouse.

I have no idea what it was.  All I know is I remember my Mom being terrified and my hair standing on the back of my neck.

Description of Creature:   N/A

Activities of Witness:   Sitting around a kitchen table and talking.

Other Notes:  I remember that my cousins mentioned they had to buy a new rooster because the one they had was missing.  But they did live in the mountains and there are other wild animals around.

Other Other Notes:  N/A