Long before the word Bigfoot existed, long before the Patterson–Gimlin film, and long before modern cryptozoology, Tennessee had its own name for the creature that haunted the deep woods: The Wildman.

The stories were old, older than statehood, older than the Civil War, and they were kept alive not by scientists or organized investigators, but by frontier journalists, rural historians, and later folklorists who treated these accounts as part of the region’s living memory.