Why We Called the Dog “Stumpy”
by Johanna Haas
I saw the Abbagoochie once. I still don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s a cryptid, or maybe just an out-of-place animal. I’ll tell you the story. It has to start with a little about West Virginia, where I grew up.
Every place in West Virginia has its own monster. There’s Mothman in Point Pleasant. You know about Mothman. He’s famous today, even Chicago has its own Mothman now. In 1966, some folks saw a man with large wings and gigantic eyes swooping around in the sky. The next year someone saw him before the Silver Bridge Collapsed, and thus he became a portent of doom.
Personally, I think that sounds a little too easy. I could start showing up in places where things were likely to go wrong and become a portent myself. Sue, now, she’s a portent of doom; invite her to your next party and see what happens.
The Mothman is on mugs and t-shirts. The Flatwoods Monster, who looks like the ace of spades come to life, came to notice in 1952. He hissed at some kids, earning a place as the local boogeyman.
And there’s Sheepsquatch. Yeah, I love the name Sheepsquatch, too. It looks like a Sasquatch but has white wooly hair, like a sheep, with a depraved attitude. She pops up all over the place; no impending doom needed except herself, of course.
Trees cover all of West Virginia, except where people and water are, and there’s not much of either in the state. When I was young, it used to be called “Wild Wonderful West Virginia.” In my mind it always was; wild, that is. The minute you stepped out of town; you were in God’s country where nobody would hear you yelling. No, forget cellphone reception. When I go home, I still have to walk out to the backyard and hold on to the apple tree to make a call.
I lived in Buckhannon, West Virginia, back in the day. I grew up there. It’s the exit off the four-lane where you see the huge “Hallelujah Barn.” Otherwise, it’s famous for being quaint and having nothing happen there. Main Street is lined with flowers and antique shops. It’s a nice place to visit if you’re into that sort of thing. I worked in the bookstore there until I found a way out and followed the promise of the big city to Columbus.
That tranquility changed in the early 1990s. Stories of strange sightings circulated around the county. Something was attacking dogs and cows and eating their legs. Just their legs, which is revolting when you think about it. Something black, sleek, and near-invisible in the woods ran off when sighted. Several people south of town had seen it. Too many people.
A black blur at first, then Mr. Winn said it was a large cat. From that point on, everyone said it was a cat. They said someone had imported the giant cat from Costa Rica. Which is fine, except I can’t figure why someone would fly an enormous, mean jaguar to the middle of the woods in West Virginia in the first place. I can’t see any money in it, that’s for sure.
Most people living in the other counties thought the residents of Upshur County were experiencing some sort of mass hallucination of the large black cat. Monsters are a thing of the past, old legends and stories told around campfires. Nobody knows how to deal with a living monster. They figured either something was wrong with our water supply, or we were plotting a devious way to enlarge our share of the state’s tourism business. They also thought that we weren’t too bright to begin with; a bunch of dumb hicks.
I know the Abbagoochie is real. That’s what we called it, “a” (as in cat)-buh-goo-chee, emphasis on “goo.” No, I don’t know how it got that name.
Yes, it’s a very odd name, but it’s a monster. Monsters can have odd names. What about the Chupacabra? Oh, that actually means something in Spanish. Well, Abbagoochie doesn’t mean anything.
Anyway, I’ve seen it. Live and in person.
I was out at Hampton, visiting Ernie. He lived out in the country, near the abandoned Beaver Coal Mine with his aunt and uncle. That mine blew up about 15 years later. It was always gassy and they should have left it be. Locals wouldn’t work there.
Ernie and his family didn’t have a herd of cows or even that much land. What they had was two trailers and a couple of acres worth of back yard, big enough for the dogs to run around in. They also had about eight small dogs who ran in a pack and annoyed the neighbors.
Their land backed up against the woods. Well, if you lived out of town, everybody’s land backed up against the woods. When I was a kid, the edges of the forest were the best places to play, but if you got in too deep, everything started to look the same. These woods were not the forest primeval. They were all second growth or third growth, logged before and replanted. The new woods were more pine than they’d originally been. And a pine woods is dark, year round, the kind of dark that can hide most things that want to be hidden.
Ernie and I were sitting out back of the house, talking and smoking cigarettes. We couldn’t do that inside the house, his uncle was allergic. The sun was setting behind the mountains. We were supposed to be keeping an eye on the dogs but were more involved in an earnest conversation about which Vincent Price films were the best. Anyway, it’s impossible to control those pups, and I’m not chasing them. I suppose most people would say we had too much of the supernatural on our minds to be credible witnesses to what happened next.
In the middle of our discussion, we hear a piercing shriek from one dog. Now this wasn’t any sort of noise I had ever heard a dog make before. It wasn’t a bark or yip. It was more of a high-pitched whine that sounded almost human. The hair stood up all the way down my back as I turned my head to the noise and looked toward the tree-line.
We saw one dog, but next to it — no, on top of it — was a huge black shape. It had the dog by the leg and was dragging the dog off towards the trees. We jumped up and ran towards it, like the fools that we were. Closer, we reassessed the situation and stopped dead in our tracks. It was colossal, about the size of a horse. It was black all over except for its eyes. It had a horrible, mean look in its big, yellow eyes. It couldn’t be anything except the Abbagoochie.
For a good, long minute we stared at it, and it stared back at us. I know, it was likely just a few seconds, but it seemed eternal. It was black as the shadows on the east side of the hills. Its teeth clamped fiercely onto the dog’s leg, with blood and saliva running from the corners of its mouth. The dog had given up on its crying and passed out.
Ernie and I just stood there. I wanted so much to turn around and run back to the house, but my feet were not responding. Then, as fast as it appeared, the great cat-like thing disappeared. I can’t properly say I saw it go. The sun was setting over the hills, and its black form just kind of blended back into the forest, leaving the unconscious dog behind.
When we could move again, we picked up the dog, covered in blood, with one of its legs torn clean off. We carried the dog back to the house, calling for Ernie’s aunt, who appeared with the car keys to whisk the dog off to the vet, Dr. Fisher’s. With a little time and care, the three-legged dog — called “Stumpy” from that point on — got better. But I had seen the Abbagoochie. I saw it clear and real, about as far away from me as that post is. Strange things live in those hills.
Now, I collect people’s stories about any monsters they see. We’ve built a reputation and folks come visit Abbagoochie Press to bring me stories and chat about monster sightings. I transcribe them, and we publish them in our magazine. Most of these animals or cryptids hold to their own. They stay in the deep forests and shun all signs of humanity. The Abbagoochie lives off the human settlements. It attacks animals for food. Or maybe not for food, since it doesn’t take the meaty parts.
Thinking about it, I don’t know why it doesn’t just go after the deer. There sure are enough of them.
The wild cats left in the area are just bobcats. While they are small, it’s a smart idea to avoid them. I think mountain lions are around still, or painters, as folks around here call them. The state disagrees and says they are extinct in the state. Lots of people see mountain lions and post pictures online. Anyway, the Abbagoochie is roughly the size of a horse; bigger than a mountain lion. Painters and bobcats both take on forest camouflage. Their coats are mixes of mottled browns and yellows, while the Abbagoochie is midnight black.
The best place to hear about the monster in Buckhannon is The Book Store, downtown, in the mornings when all the old men gather. When I was a child, I always wondered why people called the store “The Book Store” when it sold office supplies and sporting goods, and not too many books at all. Then I learned that this is where the town’s bookies were taking sports bets. It was the other kind of “book” store. But the old men who hang out there know every idea that people have about the Abbagoochie as much as they know the spread on the weekend’s games.
Now, some of them thought the Abbagoochie was a wild cat gone bad. I’m uncertain it was a cat I saw, but I’m not certain, either, that it wasn’t. The “bad cat” speculation runs from rabies to the animal having an almost thoughtful loathing of all things human and striking back at us in the only way it knows how.
Some of them think it escaped from a visiting circus or had been a rich person’s pet. That way, it was used to humans and drawn to their settlements, feeding in the only way it knew how. Still others think it’s some sort of specter, the ghost of some evil man who gets his revenge on the community that scorned him by destroying their animals. But even for that, the leg-eating part is just weird. It cripples an animal, but then doesn’t return to finish it.
With their own theories, different people had plans for the Abbagoochie. Most of the county’s residents just wanted to kill it. Admit it, a stuffed Abbagoochie head would make a magnificent trophy on someone’s wall. These people wanted to rid their safe mountain community of the menace of the ferocious and unknown. Also, being out in the woods at daybreak, doused with dominant buck urine, was the favorite activity of most men and a few women.
One man, down in French Creek in the southern part of the county, set up an Abbagoochie preserve, He built a big pen in his backyard, painted up a big sign at the end of his driveway, and even bought an old cash register so he could take money from the tourists who would flock from all over the state to see his catch. All he needed was an Abbagoochie to stock his zoo. He offered a reward of $2000 to anyone who would bring him a live Abbagoochie. He even made the front page of the local paper, the Record Delta.
My boss at The Book Store made up a bunch of rhymes about it and did some story-telling around with kids drumming on their knees and chanting, “Ab-a-goo-chee, Ab-a-goo-chee.”” He tried to write a book about it, but Phyllis Reynolds Naylor beat him to it. At least she set part of her book in the store and included the trap door that terrified me when it was open. I knew I was going to fall into it one day.
No one has ever caught the Abbagoochie, at least not yet. But I’ve heard no complaints about it for a while. Maybe someone shot it, but I can’t imagine them not bragging about it. Or maybe it moved on to another town where the people are too smart to say, in public, they saw a giant black cat eating off the legs of cows and dogs.
If it was a jungle cat, it probably died on its own when winter came around. An amateur taxidermist caused a whirl online when he stuffed a deer butt, put eyes on it, and a couple of other animal parts. He called it the Abbagoochie. But I will promise you it doesn’t look a thing like the monster. Just go look it up online. It’s not even dark.
The Abbagoochie faded, as most monsters do. Every once in a while, someone will have a sorry excuse for a sighting. Let’s just say it’s no longer front-page news on The Record Delta. Now all you read about is softball teams and power outages.
I’m not there anymore. That makes me a statistic, as most of us leave West Virginia. Besides being beautiful, it offers little but a hard life. When I moved to Ohio, I discovered regular grocery stores sold pita bread and bagels. No more trips to Pittsburgh to stock up. I got a job in data entry for a textbook publishing company and started Abbagoochie Press in my free time.
Plus, you get way more channels on TV here. So, that’s where you can find me. After work, sitting on the couch, eating a bagel and watching TV, living the good life. I figure the Abbagoochie left for a better place too. I hope it went deeper into the hills, where it would be safe from humans.
And, by the way, there was something wrong with our water supply. A bunch of residents were dumping their sewage straight into the river. The local newspaper found that City Hall and the water and sewer department were both dumping straight into the river. That’s hardly the worst of it. The coal mines upriver were also dumping waste. Our water was not good. Was it bad enough to make folks hallucinate? I doubt it. And I’m glad I don’t live there anymore. I saw what I saw, and what I saw was the Abbagoochie.
Copyright © 2022 by Johanna Haas
