Summoning the spectral creature that spooked West Knoxville

by Jack Neely

A century ago, Middlebrook Pike was a quiet country road just beyond the western city limits. In the summer of '94, the beef farmers of Middlebrook were dealing with a peculiar sort of theft. Heads of slaughtered cows were vanishing from Middlebrook slaughtering pens. The rumor spread that a panther was prowling West Knoxville.

It was a troublesome spell all around. A rebellious Knoxville teenager ran away with a roaming band of gypsies, only to turn up murdered in Boyd's Creek. There was a rash of barn-burnings in North Knoxville. And downtown one afternoon, the men lounging outside Schubert's Saloon were startled to see Gay Street begin to move in a low wave, the asphalt bowing "as if a giant mole was forcing his way right under the pavement." It turned out to be a broken water main.

And people kept an eye out for that panther. On certain evenings, hunters peering through the dense woods just about a mile past the last streetcar stop saw something peculiar. There on the left of the road, just this side of Major Webb's house, a pale figure in the dense woods. Most described it as a large, white animal, twice as big as any dog—at least eight feet long, some said—and with a different sort of head.

Seasoned hunters ran for their lives. One man claimed it chased him a full mile before he got home and shut the door behind him. It appeared and disappeared so suddenly, most reasoned it couldn't be anything but a ghost.

"That there is something," went the Knoxville Tribune's noncommittal assessment, "there is no mistake."

A neighbor by the name of Day offered an extravagant reward—a horse and buggy—to anyone who might capture it. Knoxville's curious appeared on Middlebrook, armed with pistols and shotguns, in search of the spectre. Spotting it, Sam Mays fired directly at the beast, but it didn't flinch. Everyone who saw the ghost ran from it—everyone, that is, until one Saturday night when two teenagers, Polk Blanton and Dave Menton, came to these woods, loaded for ghost.

They picked a post in a dense spot of the woods, sat on a log, and waited. They'd been there maybe 15 minutes when they heard something heavy just behind them, "like a wagon," they said, rolling over rocks. "Presently the ghost appeared," went an account of their adventure in the Knoxville Tribune. It came within a few feet of where the boys sat before it "lay down and began to stretch itself."

One of the boys coolly took some matches from his pocket and lit a candle. It apparently startled the spectre, who "started off in a trot down a dark hollow." When they caught sight of it again, it appeared to vanish into a sinkhole.

The boys returned to report that the so-called ghost was "nothing more than a white bear." But that was hardly any less remarkable than a ghost. After all, lots of people in Tennessee had seen ghosts. Few had seen white bears.

After the Tribune's account, readers protested that it was "a sure-enough ghost." Some neighbors claimed the Middlebrook ghost had been visiting them since the Civil War. One old-timer, a Mr. Dawson, claimed, "That haunt has been there nigh on 30 years." He said it had changed its color over the years; first it was black, later dark gray. Now it was snow white. There was even a legend attached. A century or more ago, Dawson said, a wealthy settler had lived here. Threatened by hostile Indians, the settler had put all his money in a bag and took off running through these woods, the Indians on his heels. He ditched his money in the hole of a rotten stump. Every night, Dawson said, the ghost retires to the same hole before dawn. Find where the ghost lives, and you'll find the settler's fortune.

Every night for weeks, 50 to 200 ghost hunters, some looking for the ghost's treasure, some for Mr. Day's reward, some for both, combed the woods, firing at anything that moved. A couple of cows were casualties. Even Melville Thompson, Mayor of Knoxville, was there one Sunday night, armed and "heeled to kill or be killed." But Mayor Thompson "saw a ghost not," reported the Tribune. "Crestfallen and sick of heart, he returned to the city..."

There was talk of invoking the great Captain Henry Gibson, the poet-lawyer then running a successful campaign for U.S. Congress; Union veteran Gibson was already held to have near-supernatural powers (according to one suspicious news story, the Emperor of China was seeking Gibson's military advice in defeating the Japanese). Concerning the Middlebrook problem, one editor opined, "By Captain Gibson's sword, the ghost might be run through and through and brought triumphantly into the city."

But both Dawson and his neighbor J.R. Powell claimed they'd "rather have ghosts than all these people." Weary of the trampled corn, slain cattle, broken fences, and all-night gunfire, the landowners began threatening to charge erstwhile ghost hunters with trespassing.

About two weeks later, the Tribune headlined a sad epilogue: "THE GHOST HAS GONE. All at Once Talk of the Spectre Stopped." The good people of Middlebrook got rid of the tourists. And if they got their ghost back, this time they were quiet about it.

In England, a well-known doctor contemplated a mystery about the ghostly appearances of a "beast shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon." But Arthur Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles wouldn't be published until seven years after the appearance of the Beast of Middlebrook Pike.