Rough draft:
Something between a monkey and a wolf crossed a dark road south of Roanoke in 1994, and it was not the first time.
It was a stormy spring night. A woman from Ohio was driving through Southwest Virginia on her way to the Outer Banks, and construction delays forced her off the highway onto a dark two-lane road south of Roanoke. She later described the area as the most isolated place she had ever been: no lights, no houses, nothing but trees and the sound of thunder. Around 2:30 a.m., lightning flashed across the sky, and a dark, muscular shape leapt across the road in front of her car.
She described it as a monkey and wolf hybrid: short sleek black fur, about six feet tall, pointy ears, a flat snout, and a long thin tail. It was muscular and thin, and it walked off without seeming to notice her or her car. She said it looked like something between a monkey and a wolf, but too thin, too muscular, and too wrong to be either.
Shortly after the sighting, stories of missing pets and livestock began. A couple in nearby Shawsville reported seeing a creature on their property one night, and their German Shepherd had gone missing afterward. Farmers near Shawsville, Elliston, and Vinton claimed to hear strange screams echoing from the woods at night, a sound like a human yell mixed with a hyena’s cackle.
The 1994 encounter was not the first, or the last. Similar reports surfaced through the 1970s and 1980s in Tennessee, West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky. In Saltville, an elderly man claimed to have seen a black, dog-faced monkey thing rummaging through his trash. In Marion, hikers reported a creature that followed them for over a mile, grunting and snapping branches. Across Appalachia it has earned many names: the Devil Monkey, the Mountain Ape, and the Ridge Runner.
The story comes from L.B. Taylor Jr.’s book Monsters of Virginia: Mysterious Creatures in the Old Dominion. Explanations offered include an escaped zoo animal. No specimen, no photograph, and no official record has ever confirmed it.
This is Tales from the Holler No. 1, a new series on the strange stories of the valley.
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