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“The Hairy Woman,” or the Yeahoh, is an Appalachian folk tale linked to the global tradition of wild men stories and the literary theme of the traveler marooned among strangers. In the most common Appalachian version, a man meets a mysterious hairy “wild woman” in the forest and builds a life with her. The happy couple even welcome a child. But the union between the civilized and the primitive cannot last, and the story takes a terrible turn. When the man chooses to return to civilization, the wild woman kills their child by tearing it in half.
While most published versions of the folktale came from the Appalachian region of Kentucky in the 1940s and 1950s, variants have been found in other states, and consistent story elements, such as an escape by ship across a body of water, suggest that the tale traveled to the Appalachian region from overseas locations. Some scholars believe that the roots of the story go back to themes found in European literature from the eighteenth century
The most widely published accounts of “The Hairy Woman” come from the mountains of southeastern Kentucky. Folklorist Leonard W. Roberts collected at least four variations in Leslie, Perry, and Harlan counties between 1948 and 1955. These included a brief version from Perry County published as “Origin of Man” in 1955, two variations published in the “Curious Legend of the Kentucky Mountains” in Western Folklore in 1957—one from Leslie County in 1950 and another gathered in Perry County in 1954—and a fourth variant recorded in Harlan County in 1955. In two of these retellings, the creature is called “the Yeahoh” based on the only word it utters: “Yeahoh, Yeahoh.”
While these accounts vary in length and detail, they tell the same basic story. A man wandering in the woods comes across a cave or hole, enters, and lies down to rest. At some point, he is joined by the cave’s inhabitant, a very hairy creature he recognizes as female. She accepts his presence and shares her food with him, mainly deer, although bear and chestnuts are also mentioned. They bond over food, and he stays with her in the woods for about two years (Roberts 1957, 49; Roberts, 1955). Nature takes its course and the couple produce a child. Yet the man eventually desires to return to his own kind. Against the woman’s wishes, he leaves, fleeing by ship or boat across a large body of water. In anger and despair, the abandoned wild woman tears their child in two and tosses half of it at her departing human lover. In one version, the enraged creature kills as many as six children (Roberts 1957, 49).
In more detailed variants, key story elements emphasize the divide between the civilized man and the primitive woman. He teaches her how to “brown” or “broil” meat over a fire; she must overcome her fear of the flames and learn how to eat cooked meat (Roberts 1957, 49; Roberts 1955). Their child is half beast, half human; one side is covered with hair while the other side is smooth-skinned or “slick.” When the abandoned woman rips their offspring in two, she literally tears apart the human and the beast, hurling one half toward her departing mate while holding the other in her arms. Sometimes she keeps the hairy side; in other accounts, she keeps the smooth-skinned half and throws the hairy side to the man in the boat.
Myths about “wild men” have long haunted the forests and mountains of many cultures around the world, including North America’s Sasquatch or Bigfoot, Australia’s Yowie, and the Himalayan Yeti. A great number of folktales derive from these stories, and “The Hairy Woman” certainly fits within this larger tradition. But specific elements of the Appalachian folktale, especially the dramatic ending of a shipboard escape, raise questions about its origins, since few ships beyond small river craft sailed away from the mountains of southeastern Kentucky.
Two variants collected in Virginia and Maine provide clues. Folklorist James Taylor Adams recorded a version from the Appalachian region of nearby Big Laurel, Wise County, Virginia, in 1940 that strengthens the context of the boat motif. Also called “The Hairy Woman,” it shares many underlying elements of the Kentucky tale, but with key differences. The story takes place on an island and the man is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. He builds a hut and the wild woman comes to him. Again, they have a child, half-hairy and half-smooth. The man’s escape is prompted when he sees an approaching ship and realizes that he wants to return to his own people. He gestures from shore and a rescue boat is sent. The wild woman clings to him and pleads for him to stay, but the result is the same; he leaves by boat and she rips their child in half. While this version was recorded in 1940, the teller recalled learning it from his father about eighty years earlier, placing it in the region by about 1860 (Adams 1991).
Further east, folklorist Richard M. Dorson recorded a tale in Maine in 1956 that reversed the identities of the male and female characters yet also gave the story a clearer connection to the water (Dorson 1975, 485–487). In “The Legend of Yoho Cove,” the boat is a canoe, and a young girl is snatched when a group goes hunting for raspberries in a coastal cove. The wild man is called the “Yoho” based on the only words he hollers, “Yoho, yoho.” This version gives minimal detail about the captive’s experience; the girl is “missed a lot” and believed dead. Two years later, another group hunting berries in the same cove is greeted by the long-lost girl running toward them with a baby in her arms. She is rescued, but alas, the Yoho snatches the ill-fated child and tears it in two, throwing half into the escaping canoe and keeping half for itself. Unlike the Kentucky and Virginia stories, this tale has a specific location. The storyteller places it in a cove about “two miles below” where he lived in Machias, Maine, a northeastern coastal town near the border of New Brunswick, Canada. In his notes, Dorson also mentioned the possible existence of a French-Canadian version in which the kidnapped girl escaped not from a wild man, but from a gorilla (Dorson 1975, 486).
References to shipwrecks, islands, a cove on the Atlantic coast, and a gorilla hint at what some scholars consider to be the true origin of “The Hairy Woman.” They believe that key elements of the story traveled across the Atlantic with English and European literature that tapped into older seafaring traditions. Tales about men, women, and feral children lost at sea and stranded on mysterious islands among the apes, monkeys, and primitive cultures were recorded in sailors’ journals and European travel literature going back to the seventeenth century. Writers such as Daniel Defoe, who wrote the novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Jonathan Swift, best known for Gulliver’s Travels (1726), created very popular books that played off this tradition, entertaining readers with the adventures of men marooned in primitive settings among strange and threatening beings.
In Swift’s book, the hero Lemuel Gulliver even meets a race of filthy, human-like beings called “Yahoos.” One of Swift’s fans was the American pioneer Daniel Boone, who reportedly carried a copy of Gulliver’s Travels with him and told his own tall tales of killing a hairy, ten-foot creature he called a “Yahoo.” Boone spent years exploring southeastern Kentucky, and some people believe that the Appalachian term “Yeahoh” may be a variation of “Yahoo” (Tabler 2015; Zueffle 1997). Some scholars also think this might be one source of the legend of Bigfoot. But many Americans enjoyed seafaring tales and read books such as Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe. Variations of “The Hairy Woman” could have traveled inland from different communities along the Atlantic coast, with new details and settings added as the location changed. For example, “Yoho” could also be a variation of “Yahoo,” with story details such as the canoe added that make sense for a coastal community in Maine. Either way, the result was the same, that is, distinct regional variations of an age-old tale that warns of the perils that await when the civilized and the primitive collide.
Leslie A. Przybylek
See also Bigfoot or Sasquatch; European Sources; Hardy Hardhead; Hoe Handle, Snake, and Barn; Women in Folklore
Further Reading
Adams, James Taylor. 1991. “The Hairy Woman.” AppLit website. http://www2.ferrum.edu/applit/texts/hairywoman.htm. Accessed May 30, 2015.
Dorson, Richard M. 1975. “The Ape-Man: His Kith and Kin.” Folktales Told Around the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Roberts, Leonard W. 1955. “Hairy Woman sound recording.” Berea (College) Digital website. http://digital.berea.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/p15131coll4/id/5238/rec/19. Accessed May 29, 2015.
Roberts, Leonard W. 1955. South from Hell-fer-Sartin: Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.
Roberts, Leonard W. 1957. “Curious Legend of the Kentucky Mountains.” Western Folklore 16: 48–51.
Tabler, Dave. 2015. “Yeahoh, Yahoo or Bigfoot?” Appalachian History blog. May 20. http://www.appalachianhistory.net/2015/05/yeahoh-yahoo-or-bigfoot.html. Accessed May 30, 2015.
“Two Tales of the Yeahoh.” 2006. Bigfoot Encounters website. http://www.bigfootencounters.com/legends/yeahoh.htm. Accessed May 29, 2015.
Zueffle, David M. 1997. “Swift, Boone, and Bigfoot: New Evidence for a Literary Connection.” Skeptical Inquirer 21: 57–58. http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/si_zueffle97.htm. Accessed June 22, 2015.