BEAST OF BLADENBORO

Opening

Over two weeks at the turn of 1954, something killed dogs around Bladenboro, a small mill town in Bladen County, North Carolina. People described bodies torn open and, they said, drained of blood. The newspapers called it a vampire beast. By the second week of January hundreds of armed men were hunting the swamps, and the town was famous.

Timeline

29 December 1953. In nearby Clarkton, a dog is killed by an animal described as sleek, black and about five feet long.

31 December. Two dogs are found dead in Bladenboro. Their owner, Johnny Vause, describes big puddles of blood on the porch and the top of one dog’s head torn off.

1 to 4 January 1954. More dogs are found dead, along with a rabbit and a goat. Reports say the bodies had little blood left in them. Police Chief Roy Fores leads searches with dogs and traps.

5 to 7 January. Word spreads through regional and national papers. Five hundred hunters turn out, then as many as a thousand. With so many guns in the woods, the town calls the hunt off for safety.

13 January. Several people claim to have killed the beast. Luther Davis says he shot a bobcat in Big Swamp. Bruce Soles reports hitting a large spotted cat with his car. The killings stop soon after.

Key figures

Johnny Vause and the other owners who lost dogs. Police Chief Roy Fores and Mayor Woodrow Fussell, who ran the town’s response and later worried the hunt was more dangerous than the animal. Luther Davis, Bruce Soles and Berry Lewis, who each claimed a kill.

Physical and documentary trail

On the paper: the local and regional newspaper coverage of the time, which quotes witnesses and officials by name. A shot bobcat was reportedly put on display, and the town treated it as the culprit. What is missing is any examination of the dead dogs by a vet, any test of the “drained of blood” claim, or any check that the bobcat shot was the animal responsible.

Competing explanations

A bobcat. The official end of the story. Bobcats live in the swamps and do kill small animals. Against it: an ordinary bobcat is much smaller than the five-foot animal described, and killing grown dogs is unusual for one.

A larger cat. A cougar, or a big cat escaped from a travelling show, would fit the size and the damage better. Bruce Soles described a cat spotted like a leopard. No such animal was caught.

Dogs or other animals, magnified by a scare. Feral dogs kill other dogs. Once the papers called it a vampire, every dead animal in the county may have been blamed on the beast. The claim of drained blood is common in scares like this, and usually means the blood soaked into the ground.

Later life of the case

Bladenboro has kept its beast. The town holds an annual Beast Fest, and the creature is the mascot of its local community group.

Finding

Something killed several dogs around Bladenboro in the winter of 1953 to 1954, and the town’s alarm was real. The best explanation is a large wild cat or other predator, made into a vampire by excited newspaper coverage. The bobcat shot in January closed the hunt, but nobody showed it was the right animal.

What still will not resolve: what Bruce Soles hit with his car, and where it went.