Sheepsquatch

The White Devil of Appalachia

By: Pat McDoyle

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In the mountains of southern West Virginia, a legend has been building for centuries. It begins with whispered accounts of pale, massive creatures encountered by colonial settlers and coal miners in the 1700s and 1800s. It accelerates through the dramatic sightings of 1994 and 1995 that gave the creature its modern name. And it continues in documented encounters that stretch from the contaminated hollows of Mason County all the way into the George Washington National Forest of Virginia.

Sheepsquatch: The White Devil of Appalachia is the definitive account of one of the most bizarre and persistently documented cryptids in American folklore. Part investigative narrative, part cultural history, and part examination of the industrial landscape that may have shaped the legend, this book takes the Sheepsquatch seriously in a way that sensationalized television and video game adaptations never have.

Inside these pages you will find the full story: the 1999 campground siege in Boone County that left six campers fleeing through the dark and a campsite destroyed beyond recognition. The 1994 encounter in which Navy veteran Edward Rollins observed the creature drinking from a contaminated creek in the TNT Area and offered the most clinically detailed description in the recorded history of the beast. The 1995 car attack that left deep claw marks etched into a vehicle's door panel as physical proof of a confrontation that should not have been possible. And the 2015 Fulks Run chase, in which the creature crossed a river in pursuit of a camping group before being stopped in its tracks by a sound from somewhere deep in the Virginia forest that no one has ever identified.

This book also traces the creature's roots into Appalachian folk tradition, examining the work of West Virginia folklorist Ruth Ann Musick, whose 1965 collection preserved the earliest written White Thing accounts and whose analysis of these entities as something beyond standard zoological classification remains the most honest framework anyone has produced. It examines the industrial history of the former WWII ammunition plant in Mason County, where chemical contamination created the conditions that both skeptics and believers have pointed to as central to the creature's origin and identity. And it follows the Sheepsquatch's remarkable journey from regional terror to global cultural icon, from Fallout 76 to Mountain Monsters to the Cryptid Mountain Mini Golf course in Morgantown.

Whether you approach this subject as a believer, a skeptic, or simply someone drawn to the specific strangeness that the Appalachian mountains have always generated, Sheepsquatch: The White Devil of Appalachia offers the most thorough and serious treatment of this legend yet committed to print. The witnesses deserve that much. And whatever is moving through the hollows of Boone County deserves it too.