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“Tailypo” is a widespread Southern monster story featuring a sinister beast of unknown origin on a quest to reclaim its tail from a hunter. It is frequently used as a ghost story or campfire “jump” tale, similar to “The Golden Arm” or the English tale “Teeny-Tiny,” in which the teller surprises listeners during the creature’s final appearance by raising his or her voice or suddenly grabbing at one of the audience members.
The hunter in this tale is a bit of a recluse who isolates himself in his cabin with three dogs, usually named Uno, Ino, and Cumptico-Calico. With little to eat and game in short supply, the man and his dogs set about to eat a strange animal that makes an appearance in their cabin, just as they are about to go to sleep. This beast is usually described as having a long, thick tail and a large, furry body: something like a cross between a wildcat, such as a bobcat or a mountain lion, and an opossum. The hunter hacks off the creature’s tail with his axe, and his dogs drive the thing out of the cabin. The man then cooks the tail and eats it, sharing some of it with his dogs, and goes back to sleep. However, his slumber is short. In the middle of the night, he hears something scratching around the cabin, calling out for its “Taily-po” in a repeated chant: “Taily-po, Taily-po, all I want’s my Taily-po!” The hunter calls on his dogs to run the creature off as they have done before. This time, however, they do not return. The creature comes back for a final visit, destroying the cabin in search of its “Taily-po.” The monster finally comes up to the bed where the hunter lies shivering and afraid, climbs up on top of him, and demands its “Taily-po” before delivering him a fatal blow, often eating him as the hunter had eaten the Tailypo’s tail meat. Storytellers frequently add a coda, stating that the creature can still be heard “when the moon shines and the wind blows” calling through the woods “Taily-po, Taily-po, now I’ve got my Taily-po.”
The Tailypo legend appears in a number of variations, such as “Tailipoe,” “Tater Toe,” and “The Devil’s Big Toe.” As these latter names suggest, the nature of the creature and the part of the beast consumed change depending on the telling. In some versions, the protagonist digs up what he thinks is a particularly large potato, which bleeds when he cuts it from the ground, only to find later that he has severed the big toe of a monster that comes calling for its amputated digit. The story appears in a variety of ethnic contexts in the American South, with distinctive Appalachian, African American, and Ozark variants. The most frequent and intense concentration of the legend occurs in the Appalachian region, including collections from eastern Kentucky, the Smoky Mountains of the Tennessee-Carolina border, and the Cumberland Gap area.
In several renditions of the story from the Appalachian Mountains, the person involved is not a hunter at all, but a boy of about eleven years who happens upon the toe in the course of routine chores. The father is always in some way absent in these versions, and the boy is acting as the “man of the house” in his father’s stead. In one such variation, a tale called “Chunk o’ Meat,” the creature does not live outside the home, but rather inside the chimney of the house. Struggling to find food, the boy happens to find a piece of strange-looking meat hanging in his chimney. He immediately considers it as manna from heaven and adds it to the family stewpot. Tellers of this latter account often use a tension-building technique similar to oral deliveries of “Little Red Riding Hood,” in which the boy interacts several times with the creature and asks it about its appearance before the beast finally shouts to the child that it will “eat him up.” This version also bears remarkable similarities to another Southern folktale, “Raw Head and Bloody Bones,” and so may represent a narrative link between the two stories.
On very rare occasions, some versions have the man or boy survive his encounter with the Tailypo creature. An African American variant of the story tells how the protagonist saves the nearly twenty-five-foot tale rather than eating it. This turns out to be providential, for when the creature returns and threatens him, the man promptly returns the tail, and the monster disappears forever. In most cases, however, the end result of the encounter is death at the hands of the Tailypo beast. Another rare variation, “The Devil’s Big Toe,” recorded in Leonard Roberts’s collection Sang Branch Settlers: Folksongs and Tales of a Kentucky Mountain Family, has an old woman rather than a man as the story’s narrative focus. She and her husband happen upon a lumpy object while digging for potatoes, and when they pull it up, they find it is a big toe, which they promptly cook and eat. The creature comes down the chimney, just as in the “Chunk o’ Meat” version, and forces the couple to search for the missing toe (which they have, of course, already eaten, although they fear to tell the monster that). Interestingly, the creature described never matches any Appalachian descriptions of “devils,” but rather appears to be the same large, hairy, unidentified creature found in most versions of the story. The title comes from the husband’s description of the meaty object pulled from the garden, which he claims looks like “the devil’s big toe.”
The Tailypo legend revolves around common anxieties for rural families, particularly those in Appalachia, among these the fear of isolation. In almost all versions of the story, the hunter or protagonist is only truly vulnerable once his dogs have been separated from him. Due to the geography of the Appalachian Mountains, families and neighbors were often separated from one another by several days of travel, which left small family units or lone mountain-dwellers particularly prone to harm in the absence of any substantial network. Mountain predators like large wildcats and bears could pose a danger to those who were unprepared for them. Livestock or pets that fell victim to natural predation during dark nights may have helped inspire stories like “Tailypo,” with its monstrous beast first eliminating the dogs before finally turning on the human in the story. The visual appearance of the creature generally combines various elements of nocturnal predators, or of other night-walking animals like the opossum.
The other pressing theme in these tales is the anxiety of food security, as the horrifying events are all set into motion by famine-like conditions experienced by the household. Sometimes the creature’s tail is described as slimy or disgusting, but it goes in the stewpot nevertheless since the family is on the brink of starvation. The desperate situation of the Appalachian dweller on the brink of starvation leading to the violation of food taboos is central to the story. In the “big toe” variations, the toe’s protrusion from the ground associates it with a human corpse, turning the act of consumption into an act of cannibalism. Such violations of food taboos often result in terror and death in folk stories.
The story is very popular on the storytelling circuit and has appeared in recorded collections by Jackie Torrence, Virginia Hamilton, Bob Linsenmayer, Marilyn A. Kinsella, and S. E. Schlosser. A film version appeared in 1990 entitled Tailypo: The Folktale, from Bill Wadsworth Productions in Austin, Texas. A number of illustrated children’s books also feature the story, either independently (as in Jan Wahl’s Tailypo!) or as part of a larger collection of Appalachian or other folktales (such as Anne Shelby’s “Tater Toe” version).
Cory Thomas Hutcheson
See also Demon Cat; Fearsome Critters; Scary Stories; Wampus Cat
Further Reading
Chase, Richard. 1948. Grandfather Tales. Boston: Houghton.
Roberts, Leonard. 1974. Sang Branch Settlers: Folk Songs and Tales of a Kentucky Mountain Family. Pikeville, KY: Pikesville College Press.
Schlosser, S. E. 2004. Spooky South: Tales of Hauntings, Strange Happenings, & Other Local Lore. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press.
Schwartz, Alvin. 1981. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. New York: Harper & Row.
Shelby, Anne. 2007. The Adventures of Molly Whuppie and Other Appalachian Folktales. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.