Laura Wright 
Local history has a way of remembering people whom official history forgets.
They may never have held public office, owned a great estate, commanded soldiers or done anything likely to earn a paragraph in a history book. Yet decades after they are gone, their names remain familiar within the communities where they lived.
Someone’s grandmother remembers them.
An elderly neighbor remembers seeing them as a child.
Stories pass quietly from one generation to another.
In Scott County, Virginia, one of those people was Sammy Spangler.
Sammy was remembered because he looked extraordinary. According to people who knew him, his body was covered with an unusual amount of hair. Even more remarkably, local tradition maintains that he possessed what people described as a tail.
Those details could easily turn Sammy into another Appalachian legend.
But Sammy wasn’t a monster lurking in the mountains.
He wasn’t a mysterious wild man.
He wasn’t feared by the people who knew him.
Quite the opposite.
Sammy Spangler was apparently one of the most beloved characters in his community.
A Man People Actually Remembered
Sammy’s story is particularly interesting to me because I once knew someone who remembered him personally.
A couple of years after my husband and I married, we rented from an elderly woman in Scott County. During conversations about local history, Sammy’s name came up.
She remembered him well.
According to her, everybody knew Sammy.
And everybody loved him.
He wasn’t described as an outcast living somewhere beyond respectable society. He was a familiar part of the community, known as a friendly and helpful man who regularly assisted his neighbors.
He was, in the truest sense of the expression, a local character.
His unusual appearance was certainly remembered.
But it wasn’t the most important thing people remembered about him.
Covered With Hair
According to local accounts, Sammy possessed an extraordinary amount of body hair.
One frequently remembered detail was that he liked chopping wood without a shirt. Considering his unusual appearance, this naturally made an impression upon people who saw him.
There may have been a perfectly natural medical explanation.
Hypertrichosis is a condition characterized by excessive hair growth. Several forms exist, including rare congenital varieties capable of producing extensive hair across large portions of the body.
Throughout history, people with particularly dramatic forms of hypertrichosis sometimes became famous because of their appearance. Unfortunately, some were exhibited as curiosities and given dehumanizing descriptions such as “wolf people” or “dog-faced men.”
Could Sammy have had some form of hypertrichosis?
Possibly.
But there is no known medical diagnosis associated with him, and diagnosing someone generations after his death based entirely upon oral descriptions would be irresponsible.
All we can safely say is that people who remembered Sammy described him as extraordinarily hairy.
And Then There Was the Tail
This is the detail that pushes Sammy’s story toward the seemingly impossible.
People said he had a tail.
At first glance, that sounds exactly like the sort of embellishment that develops around an unusual person after decades of storytelling.
Surprisingly, however, it is not medically impossible.
Rare congenital appendages can occur near the lower end of the human spine. Historically, these have sometimes been called human tails, although that popular description encompasses more than one type of developmental abnormality.
Some are small appendages composed primarily of skin, connective tissue, muscle, nerves and blood vessels. Other so-called pseudotails can be associated with spinal or other developmental abnormalities.
Today, such a condition would almost certainly receive medical attention very early in life.
That wasn’t necessarily true in rural Appalachia generations ago.
So it is entirely possible that Sammy possessed some type of congenital appendage that his neighbors quite reasonably called a tail.
We simply don’t know.
Don’t Turn Sammy Into a Monster
There is an obvious temptation when encountering a story about an unusually hairy Appalachian man with a supposed tail.
Connect him to Bigfoot.
Connect him to wild-man legends.
Connect him to the Wampus cat.
Turn him into a cryptid.
That would make a sensational story.
It would also do Sammy a considerable injustice.
The surviving oral tradition does not describe some unidentified creature occasionally glimpsed between the trees.
People knew this man.
They spoke with him.
They saw him regularly.
He worked.
He helped his neighbors.
They knew his name.
Most importantly, people who remembered Sammy apparently remembered him with affection.
That places him firmly in human history rather than cryptozoology.
He Was Just Sammy
Considering how unusual Sammy’s appearance apparently was, it would be easy for a modern writer to assume that he must have been ridiculed, feared or ostracized.
The testimony I heard from someone who actually remembered him suggests almost exactly the opposite.
Sammy was part of the community.
That may tell us something about the small Appalachian communities of his era.
They should not be romanticized. Appalachian communities were no more incapable of cruelty, prejudice or gossip than communities anywhere else.
But life in a small rural settlement produced a particular kind of familiarity.
People depended upon one another.
The man who looked strange was also the man who helped chop someone’s firewood.
The eccentric woman living down the road might be the person who sat beside a sick neighbor.
The family everyone knew was poor might still arrive when another family needed help bringing in a crop.
There weren’t thousands of anonymous people around you.
There were your neighbors.
And you were going to see them again tomorrow.
Under those circumstances, difference could eventually become ordinary.
Perhaps Sammy looked extraordinary to someone meeting him for the first time.
To the people who had known him for twenty years, however, he wasn’t the hairy man with a tail.
He was just Sammy.
The Community Character
Older Appalachian communities frequently had people who became what might best be called community characters.
They were people everyone knew.
Sometimes they were eccentric.
Sometimes they had unusual habits.
Some had physical or developmental differences.
Others simply possessed personalities large enough to become local institutions.
Their peculiarities became part of the community’s collective knowledge.
People might tease them occasionally. Stories certainly grew around them. But familiarity could also produce a kind of informal protection.
Everyone knew who belonged.
That appears to have been Sammy’s position.
Whatever strangers might have thought upon seeing him, his neighbors already knew the man underneath all that hair.
And apparently they liked him.
Could Sammy Have Influenced Local Legends?
The original version of Sammy’s story considered whether he might somehow be connected with Appalachian tales of the Wampus cat or other strange hairy creatures.
I would be much more cautious about that now.
Wampus traditions occur across a broad portion of Appalachia and the American South, and the creature changes considerably depending upon who is telling the story.
Sometimes it is a supernatural cat.
Sometimes it resembles an unidentified predator.
Sometimes it is associated with witchcraft or human transformation.
There is no evidence that Sammy Spangler originated any of those traditions.
It is certainly possible that memories of an unusually hairy local man became tangled with other stories over generations.
Folklore does that.
But without evidence, Sammy should remain Sammy.
He doesn’t need to become a cryptid to be interesting.
The Wild Men of Appalachia
There is, however, a broader historical context worth mentioning.
Nineteenth and early twentieth-century newspapers frequently reported sightings of supposed wild men throughout rural America.
These creatures were often described as humanlike but covered with hair.
They supposedly lived in forests, moved rapidly, screamed, avoided civilization and occasionally frightened travelers.
Some stories were plainly newspaper entertainment.
Others may have involved bears.
Some undoubtedly involved hoaxes.
Still others may have originated with people who lived apart from conventional society because of mental illness, disability, poverty or personal choice.
And occasionally, perhaps, someone with an unusual medical condition was transformed into something considerably stranger by people who did not know him.
Sammy provides an interesting contrast.
His neighbors did know him.
Consequently, he never needed to become a monster.
Why Is Sammy So Difficult to Find?
That leaves a frustrating historical problem.
If Sammy’s physical appearance was genuinely so extraordinary, why isn’t he better documented?
The answer may be disappointingly simple.
He was an ordinary man.
Official records preserve certain kinds of information extremely well.
A census might tell us a man’s age, birthplace, occupation and family relationships.
A marriage record identifies a bride and groom.
A deed tells us who owned land.
A death certificate may identify someone’s parents and cause of death.
None of those records necessarily tells us that a man had extraordinary body hair or a congenital appendage.
The very characteristics that caused generations of Scott County residents to remember Sammy might never appear in an official document.
Local memory preserved something bureaucracy had no reason to record.
Sammy May Not Have Been Sammy
There is another problem.
Sammy may have been a nickname.
His legal name could have been Samuel, although we should not assume even that.
Spelling presents another difficulty. Handwritten nineteenth-century records are notorious for transcription errors, and surnames frequently appear in several forms.
One census taker hears a name.
Another writes it differently ten years later.
A modern indexer struggles to decipher nineteenth-century handwriting.
Suddenly someone disappears from the historical record even though his information is sitting there under a slightly different name.
Finding Sammy conclusively would therefore require considerably more than typing “Sammy Spangler” into a genealogy database.
Following Sammy Home
The best way to identify him would probably be through the people who knew him.
Or, increasingly, through the descendants of those people.
Oral history could help establish approximately where Sammy lived.
That location could then be compared against census records.
Spangler households could be identified.
A likely Samuel or Sammy could be followed through successive censuses.
Land records, marriage registers, death certificates, newspapers, church records and cemetery records might gradually reconstruct his life.
Eventually the legendary Sammy might emerge as a perfectly ordinary man on paper.
Name.
Birth.
Parents.
Occupation.
Residence.
Death.
And perhaps nowhere in those records would appear the two things everyone remembered.
The hair.
And the tail.
Somewhere There May Be a Photograph
There is one possibility that particularly intrigues me.
Someone may have photographed Sammy.
If he survived into the era remembered by elderly residents I later knew, photography was common enough that his image could easily have been captured.
The photograph might still exist in a Scott County family album.
It might show a gathering outside a church.
Men standing beside a store.
A family reunion.
Neighbors working together.
Perhaps an unidentified man standing casually at the edge of the picture.
The people who originally owned the photograph would have known exactly who he was.
Their grandchildren might not.
That is one of the peculiar tragedies of local history.
Sometimes the evidence survives longer than its identification.
Oral History Matters
Sammy’s story also demonstrates why oral history should not automatically be dismissed as unreliable folklore.
Yes, oral accounts change.
Stories become exaggerated.
Dates drift.
People combine separate events.
But oral testimony can preserve information that never entered written records at all.
In Sammy’s case, I had the opportunity to speak with an elderly woman who actually remembered him.
That doesn’t prove every detail subsequently attributed to Sammy.
Human memory remains imperfect.
But it is considerably stronger evidence than discovering the same story repeated anonymously on dozens of websites.
The distinction matters.
There was still a living chain connecting Sammy to the story.
A Man Becomes Folklore
Eventually that chain breaks.
The people who personally remember someone die.
Their children remember the stories.
Their grandchildren remember fragments.
Then someone writes those fragments down.
By that point, the person has begun crossing the strange boundary between history and folklore.
That appears to be what happened to Sammy Spangler.
His physical appearance survived because it was extraordinary.
His personality survived because people liked him.
Most of the mundane details disappeared.
And perhaps that tells us something about what communities choose to remember.
Who Was Sammy Spangler?
I cannot provide Sammy’s complete biography.
I would very much like to.
Perhaps someday additional records or a family photograph will allow his story to be reconstructed.
What I can say is that Sammy was more than a peculiar Appalachian tale.
A woman I personally knew remembered him.
She remembered that he was extraordinarily hairy.
She remembered the claim that he possessed a tail.
But above all, she remembered Sammy himself.
He was friendly.
He was helpful.
People knew him.
People cared about him.
And people loved him.
More than anything else, that is the part of his story worth preserving.
It would be easy to take Sammy’s unusual appearance and transform him into another Appalachian monster. Mountain folklore has more than enough of those.
But perhaps the truth is better.
There was once an extraordinary-looking man living among the hills of Scott County.
A stranger encountering him might have stared.
His neighbors had long since stopped.
They knew something the legend tends to forget.
He wasn’t a wild man.
He wasn’t a monster.
He was Sammy.
And after all these years, people here still remember his name.
About the Author
