Eerie tales of a strange and terrifying cat, which rises up and walks on two legs, range up and down the entire eastern portion of Tennessee. I have heard tales about this creature in Knoxville, Rogersville, Cleveland, Chattanooga, Bristol, and Erwin. Apparently the stories have been circulating for years. A number of people have shared terrifying personal, first-hand experiences with the creature.

The creature is known in East Tennessee as the Wampas Cat (sometimes spelled "Wampus"). Most tales about this eerie creature are set in the deep woods or in some other remote area. But of late, there have been an increasing number of sightings reported in towns and cities.

John Hannon, an insurance agent, said one night he walked out onto the back porch of his home, located in east Knoxville, and thought he saw something moving in the small garden he had planted in his back yard.

"I couldn't tell at first what it was," Hannon said. "I thought that a dog had somehow found his way into the yard and was about to baptize my cabbage."

Hannon picked up a rock and raced toward his precious vegetables, determined to expel the intruder. But just as he reached the edge of his garden, he saw something that made him skid to a halt. Two enormous yellow eyes glared at him from behind the pole beans.

"I never had seen eyes like that in my life, except on a cat. But they were bigger than any cat eyes I had ever seen. I thought I had come face to face with an escaped lion or something like that. We have a zoo in Knoxville, don't you know."

As Hannon prepared to run back into the house, a head appeared from behind the tall plants - a head fully four feet off the ground.

"It was a cat, all right," Hannon said, still visibly shaken by the experience. "It was standing on its hind legs, its mouth open and was hissing at me. I stood there for a few seconds before I could get my legs to moving. And when I finally did, they didn't stop until I was in the house with door locked behind me. I didn't go back out there until morning. And I wasn't imagining things. There were enormous paw tracks in the garden."

Another story I heard recently placed a Wampas Cat smack dash in the middle of civilization, right in the center of downtown Johnson City.

H.W. said that his father, a carpenter who lived in Johnson City during the 1950s, was walking down Spring Street late one night. Suddenly, he saw a huge cat - the biggest he had ever seen - sauntering down the other side of the street, moving as if it had all the time in the world.

"Since my father was walking behind the animal, the cat didn't see him," H.W. said.

"The cat was about the size of a large spaniel. In fact, my daddy did mistake him for a dog at first. Then he noticed that the animal had stripes, just like a big tabby. No dog was ever marked like that!"

Every once in awhile that cat paused to sniff the side of a building, H.W. said. Then it reached Jones-Vance Pharmacy, raised up on its hind feet, put its paws on the windowsill, and peered into the window.

"Daddy stopped in his tracks. He said the cat must have been at least four feet tall when it stood on its hind legs. About then he decided that what he was seeing was a tiger, but there was no circus in town at the time.

"Then came the really scary part," H.W. said. "After the cat had seen all that it had wanted to see inside Jones-Vance, it turned and, still standing on its hind legs, continued walking down the street and disappeared around the corner. Daddy said that his blood ran cold."

What was the cat up to that night? H.W.'s father never did find out. When he peered around the corner of Spring and Main, the cat had disappeared from sight.

What is a Wampas Cat and where did it come from? Surely it's no natural creature. Some people believe that the Wampas Cat is a human who turns into a cat at night - something like the Old-World legend of the werewolf. No Wampas Cat has ever been seen in the daytime.