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The Giants of Ancient Tennessee

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John Haywood (1753-1826) was a historian known as the "father of Tennessee history." These days, he might be best known for documenting giant skeletons found in Tennessee, as well as popularizing the "Tennessee Pygmies." In Haywood's 1823 work, The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee , he documented several unique discoveries. These include giant skeletons found in Tennessee, particularly in and around White County. Haywood devoted a section to the giant skeletons found in Tennessee in his book. The entire section (Chapter VIII, section 1) is printed below: First, then—Of their Size. This is ascertained by the length and dimensions of the skeletons which are found in East and West Tennessee. These will prove demonstratively, that the ancient inhabitants of this country, either the primitive or secondary settlers, were of gigantic stature , compared with the present races of Indians.  On the farm of Mr. John Miller, of White county, are a numbe...
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Giant Bones in West Virginia

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When the Bible famously declared that “there were giants on the earth in those days,” in Genesis 6:4, the writer wasn’t kidding—especially when it comes to West Virginia. In the early days of our nation, people routinely unearthed giant bones in the Mountain State. Giant Bones Countless newspapers and county histories in the 1800s told the story of giant bones. Stories such as these were commonplace: “It is said that a jawbone was plowed up near Moorefield which would pass over the outside of a common man's lower jaw; that it contained eight jaw teeth on either side, and that they sat transversely in their sockets. A bone of that size would have belonged to a man eight or nine feet high… Another jawbone of enormous size is recorded as having been discovered near Martinsburg.” Hu Maxwell and H. L. Swisher,  History of Hampshire County West Virginia from Its Earliest Settlement to the Present  (Morgantown, WV: A. Brown Boughner, 1897) “While digging a grave on Trace Fork, Lin...
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The Nahullo

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Horatio Bardwell “H.B.” Cushman (1822–1904) was the son of missionaries to the Choctaw nation. His parents, Calvin and Laura, left their home in Massachusetts in 1820 and moved to Mississippi to minister to the Choctaw people. Cushman, who was raised among the Choctaw, considered them to be his earliest and most faithful friends. Having grown up with the Choctaw, and having a great affinity for them, Cushman became acquainted with their history, legends, and customs. In 1899, he published History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians; the book sheds much light on the traditions of the native inhabitants of the southeastern United States. In his work, Cushman wrote about the Nahullo giants of Choctaw legend. There is also a legend of mammoths and their extinction: An ancient Choctaw tradition attributes the origin of the prairies along the western banks of the Tombigbee River, to some huge animals (mammoths) that existed there at the advent of their ancestors from the west t...
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The Wa-gas

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In her book To the American Indian, Lucy Thompson (1856–1932), a member of the Yurok tribe whose Yurok name was Che-na-wah Weitch-ah-wah, recorded many of the tales of her people. One of the most interesting stories in the book is that of the Wa-gas. According to Thompson, the Wa-gas were an ancient race of white people that lived in North America many thousands of years ago. However, these folks were much different than Europeans who colonized the Americas in recent times. The following excerpt comes from Thompson’s book in a section titled “ Traditions of the Ancient White People” :
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The Giants of Ancient Peru

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The historian Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616) was the son of an Inca princess and a conquistador. He quoted the following story about ancient giants in his work  Royal Commentaries of the Incas : Before leaving this region, we should mention a very remarkable story which the natives have received as a tradition handed down by their ancestors for many centuries. It refers to some giants who they say arrived in their country from over the sea and landed at the point now called Santa Elena, a name given to it because it was first seen by Spaniards on this saint's day. As Pedro de Cieza de León is the Spanish historian who speaks of these giants at greatest length, having received his version in the very province which the giants visited, it seemed best I should follow his account word for word, for although Padre J. Acosta and the accountant general Agustín de Zárate say the same, their version is very brief. Pedro de Cieza's fuller account in his Ch. Iii is as follows: “As th...
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Giants & Dwarves

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Giants and dwarves. An ancient odd couple. From fantasy novels to 1800s newspaper stories, the two go hand in hand. My fascination with stories of ancient giants introduced me to supposed tribes of little people in ancient America. Specifically, John Haywood’s Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee opened my eyes to the enigma. His book covers in depth both enormous and diminutive skeletal finds in Middle Tennessee. But what really stuck out to me in my years of research into the ancient giants that walked the earth are reports from North America of burial mounds that contained the remains of both giants and dwarves. Over the years I have read a number of accounts of mound excavations that yielded these strange discoveries. "Graves of Dwarves Found" A Massachusetts newspaper, the North Adams Transcript , ran a piece titled “Graves of Dwarves Found” on October 24, 1899: " Workmen terracing King hill, an old landmark of northwestern Missouri, which is to be convert...
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Island of the Giants

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Christopher Columbus gets the credit for discovering the New World, but it was another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512) that proved the Americas were a large and separate land mass—not the outer fringes of Asia. The Americas, as they came to be known, were named after Amerigo Vespucci. During Vespucci’s second voyage, he landed on an island that would become known as the Isla de los Gigantes, or Island of the Giants . Vespucci recorded the following in his letters: …We found that this other island was inhabited by very tall people . We landed to see whether there was any fresh water, and not thinking it was inhabited, as we had not seen anyone, we came upon very large footprints in the sand, as we were walking along the beach. We judged that if the other measurements were in proportion to those of their feet, they must be very tall. Going in search, we came into a road which led inland. There were nine of us. Judging that there could not be many inhabitants, as the island was sma...
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A Large Turtle

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Large turtle tales are among my favorite types of cryptid encounters . Perhaps that is why I spent over a week on the outskirts of Roswell, New Mexico in 2022. I had hoped to catch a glimpse of the fabled large turtles the "size of a Volkswagen." (I did not.) Maybe the best turtle tale is the story of Oscar, the Beast of Busco. This enormous turtle, with a shell as big as "the top of a car" caused a ruckus in an Indiana town in 1949. In 1883, the Scientific American published a blurb about a large turtle—large is an understatement!—spotted at sea. I reprinted the entire text below: A Large Turtle "Captain Augustus G. Hall and the crew of the schooner Annie L. Hall vouch for the following: On March 30, while on the Grand Bank, in latitude 40° 10’, longitude 33°, they discovered an immense live trunk turtle, which was at first thought to be a Reptiles and Amphibians 535 vessel bottom up. The schooner passed within twenty-five feet of the monster, and those on bo...
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Bigfoot Musings From the Lowcountry

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The Lowcountry of South Carolina is a great destination. The food and the beaches are amazing. Cities such as Beaufort and Charleston are full of history, stunning architecture, and antebellum homes with manicured lawns that embody the deep South. Large oak trees draped with Spanish moss form canopies along narrow streets and side roads. And of course, there is Bigfoot. Visits to Lowcountry I spent a week in the Lowcountry in the summer of 2020 and again in January 2022. But I was a good hour’s drive from Hilton Head; thirty minutes away from Beaufort; and around forty-five minutes from Charleston. I stayed at a campground “in the middle of nowhere.” The nearest town was Yemassee—a small community whose roads leading in were riddled with potholes the size of kitchen sinks. The point of this post is not potholes, Spanish moss, or antebellum homes—Bigfoot is the star here. As I usually do when I arrive in a new place, I began thinking of the elusive beast. I checked the Bigfoot Field Re...
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East Bay Walls

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I first learned of the East Bay Walls by watching an episode of America Unearthed on History Channel. The episode is titled “Marco Polo Discovers America” just in case you would like to watch it. At any rate, the show introduced me to a series of mysterious walls, called  the East Bay Walls, and alternately called the California Mystery Walls and Berkeley Mystery Walls. These stacked stone walls stretch from San Jose in the southern Bay Area fifty miles north to Berkeley. At first glance the East Bay Walls do not look all that mysterious. Back on the East Coast, where I’m from, there are tons of stone walls. In my home state of Virginia, especially in the piedmont’s horse country, mortarless stacked stone walls—built in the same fashion as those in California—run for miles on end. There are tons of similar walls in the Northeast, too. Farms and wooded areas in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York have stone walls running in various directions almost as far as the eye can see. ...
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