“The Cave Without an Exit,” Unusual Tales #38, March 1963. Frightened locals warn two cave explorers to stay away from a haunted cave. The pair fight with moonshiners who work in the cave and inadvertently cause drums of booze stored there to explode.
The idea that moonshiners sometimes exploit supernatural legends to scare away potential interlopers is a folk belief about moonshiners’ own strategic use of folk beliefs. In Britain (and elsewhere?) there are similar tales about smugglers using ghost legends to safeguard their activities. See, for example, Theo Brown, The Fate of the Dead (D.S. Brewer, 1979), 39; and Karl Bell, The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England 1780-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 68-9.
Daniel S. Green, Far-Out, Shaggy, Funky Monsters (Greenville, OH: Coachwhip Publications, 2018), 817-8. A newspaper asked Floridians their opinion of the Skunk Ape. A man from Lynne responded: “I think somebody making moonshine liquor spreads these rumors to keep people scared out of their areas.” “Believe It, or Not,” Ocala Star-Banner (FL), 17 November 1977, p. 10A.
Green, Funky Monsters, 974. Knobby was a hairy hominid named after Carpenter’s Knob, Cleveland County, North Carolina, where it was supposedly first spotted in 1978. “It’s somebody running moonshine,” one resident theorized at the Cook’s hardware store. “They’re trying to scare people away.” “Knobby’s Popularity Diminishes,” Rocky Mount Telegram (NC), 13 March 1979, p. 2.
Green, Funky Monsters, 977. “Probably second only to Knobby being a bear, one of the most bandied about explanations was a simple scare tactic adopted to keep folks away from an illicit still. If any kernel of truth could be attributed to this rationale, the results flew in the face of its intent, as the crowds came to search for Knobby. As the Knobby furor died off, an event occurred which rekindled the idea Knobby was meant to ward people away from furtive moonshine production.” “In Casar community, where Knobby was seen most often, an old house caught fire and burned to the ground. The remains of the house contained one of the largest liquor stills ever found in the Carolinas, and it was learned that the fire was caused by an oil burner used in the distilling process. Naturally the diehards yelled that the Knobby or Bigfoot stories were concocted to keep people away from the site of the illegal still.” Robert L. Williams, “‘Knobby’ North Carolina’s Bigfoot,” UFO Report, September 1979, 27.
Chad Arment, The Historical Bigfoot, 2nd ed. (Greenville, OH: Coachwhip Publications, 2019), 609. One explanation for a Ralston, MS, gorilla hunt was that “moonshiners had fabricated the story to discourage officers from poking around.” “Gorilla hunt: Recess called to let the dust settle,” Hattiesburg American (MS), 12 Sep. 1952.
Arment, Historical Bigfoot, 684-5. “Nearly every officer [in Franklin County, NY] who found it possible to get away was last week searching for a reported wild man.” It was later reported that “it was nothing more than a clever ruse, effected by bootlegger[s] to take advantage of the absence of officers in coming across the border with $5000 worth of liquor.” Lake Placid News (NY), 2 Sep. 1921.
Arment, Historical Bigfoot, 764. A sheriff in Richland County, OH, stated a “huge ape” seen roaming at large “was a man engaged in bootlegging” while wearing his wife’s fur coat. The bootlegger didn’t intend to be mistaken for an ape. “‘Ape’ is revealed as county’s bootlegger,” Charleston Gazette (WV), 17 July 1931.
Turnabout being fair play, monster stories were supposedly also used by farmers to protect their berry or melon patches from thieves – including moonshiners “in search of material for their home brew” (Arment, Historical Bigfoot, 473-4, 732, 745, 828-9; see esp. 873-5, 877-8).
Joe Nickell, “Tracking the Swamp Monsters,” Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 25, no. 4, July/August 2001. “My Cajun guide…offered some interesting ideas about [Louisiana’s] Honey Island Swamp Monster and similar entities. He thought that frightening stories might have been concocted on occasion to keep outsiders away – perhaps to protect prime hunting areas or even help safeguard moonshine stills.”
William Montell, Tales of Kentucky Ghosts (University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 67. “Back during Prohibition, six moonshiners decided that [a property where an entire family had been killed years before] would be a safe place to hide a still because no one ever came around. They put the still in the barn behind the house, and one night as they celebrated a big moonshine whiskey sale, they began making fun of the “ghosts” that had been hiding them. As they joked, a fire mysteriously started in both ends of the barn and trapped them inside. One of the men, badly burnt, escaped the fire and lived long enough to tell what had happened.”
Montell, Kentucky Ghosts, 183-4. A bootlegger pretends to be a headless man to scare folks away from an abandoned mine where whiskey is made and stored.
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| Drew Murdoch, “Ghost Gallery,” Jumbo Comics #56, Oct. 1943 |
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