The Alabama White Thing
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Southern Blend
John Rittmann
It’s spooky season, folks. I’m fresh off a viewing of one of my favorite horror films and have decorated my house in cobwebs, ghouls, disembodied hands, and eerie lights.
It’s the time of year in which we remember those unknown things that exist just past our field of vision. Whether it’s deep in a steel mill, lurking in the woods, or watching you from the corner of your room, Halloween reminds us of many things. For me, it’s the unknown. There are possibilities of things beyond our comprehension. Bits of life undiscovered, and best left in the dark where it might be found.
And yet, some go looking for it.
Deep in the woods of North Alabama there are stories of one such monster. Imagine the crisp air in your lungs. Leaves crunching under your feet as you stumble through the pitch black woods. Trees block any moonlight that might guide your way.
You stop to focus, gather your composure and sojourn on to find your way back. And for a fleeting moment, you see it. It’s hard to make out because it moves quickly, and furthermore it doesn’t have a shape that you’ve quite seen before. The only reason you can make sight of it in the first place is because its monstrous body, covered in white fur, stands out against the blackness of the forest around you.
From a distance you can tell it’s larger than you, possibly eight feet tall. It stands upright, but it isn’t humanoid. Rather, the body resembles more of a marsupial, except for its head. The head is feline in shape, but this is no comfort, because at that size you must consider the length and sharpness of fangs that must exist within the obscured maw.
It looks over to you. You know from the stillness of its body that its heightened feral senses know exactly where you are. Maybe it can even see you through the black night. You don’t know. Your stomach churns in fear as it descends to all fours and begins running quickly across the forest floor.
As it approaches, an acrid smell fills your nose. It reminds you of the times you’ve run over roadkill. The stench of decayed animal matter floods your senses, blurring your vision through tear-stricken eyes. A screech fills not just your ears, but your very soul. The scream of this creature makes every joint in your body weak as mud. It sounds far too similar to that of a human woman’s bloodcurdling scream. And for a moment, as it draws near, you see its blank eyeless face.
And then it’s gone.
You have just made a rare sighting of the Alabama White Thing. Since the 1940s, sightings of this creature have been made in Walnut Grove, Moody’s Chapel, Happy Hollow, and Wheeler Wildlife Refuge. This creature has also been spotted in the caves surrounding the Huntsville area.
What is this creature? Many claim it to be a figment of the imagination, which of course is always a possibility. In moments of silence, the human mind can create terrors beyond any seen on the earth that we walk. But then there’s always that dastardly “what if?”
What if it’s real? Is that so bizarre to imagine, that there’s something lurking out in those woods that we’ve yet to have seen? Of course, it could be a mutation of the standard Bigfoot that so many have claimed to encounter across North America.
The most terrifying thing is that we don’t know. We won’t know. Because if The White Thing doesn’t walk among us, it and many other cryptids live in much more threatening territory.
The possibility of their existence will always occupy our minds.