If you’ve watched our Urban Legends Explained series on The Great Courses Plus, you know that, at the end of episode two on cryptids, I mention the fact that my grandfather used to tell me and my siblings and cousins about a strange creature that lived around the Chesapeake Bay called the Woolanie. 

(We even joke that maybe these guys were friends with Chessie, the sea monster that may or may not be lurking in the Bay itself!)

I’ve been thinking a lot about Woolanies in the wake of doing that series and trying to piece together exactly what’s going on with these guys in my own family lore. For my part, I remember my grandfather describing them as wooly (of course), kind of gangly guys who would creep around at night and steal away bad children. This idea largely fits with what my siblings and cousins remember too. 

I think the gangly idea may have come from the fact that we once got one of those street fair puppets and when we got it home my grandfather was like “a Woolanie!” so I’m not sure if that was part of the lore before that moment or not! I can’t find anything that looks exactly like it, but basically some combination of these guys →

The kidnapping/eating bad children part was definitely a core aspect of the story though. My cousin Tyler told me that she has “images of them coming out of the Bay like a swamp thing to get disobedient children” and my sister Meghan noted that “sometimes branches or something would scratch on the side of the house and I was sure that was them…” (!)

The Woolanie made a big impression on us all, clearly!!

We do have some small disagreements on the subject though. For example, my cousin Chris remembers my grandfather saying that “they live in the swamp near the bay house, apparently the only place they can be found,” but this contradicts with my sister Kate’s version of the story, because she remembers “Maryland Red” and “Kentucky Blue” Woolanies and my grandfather saying that “[i]f you spotted one from the car, […] you were safe from snatching” and that “on long road trips, this meant hours of intensive searching.

(This is a picture I drew for Sara of a Woolanie the first time I told her about all of this!)

So, as a folklorist, some things stand out to me about these stories right away.

First, the Woolanie was clearly a cautionary tale designed specifically to ensure good behavior from all of us kids. My grandfather definitely talked about the Woolanie in a way that seemed to indicate it was an older story than just his oldest grandchild (which would be Kate), but it seems pretty clear that it was always meant to be a story that kept children in line (and probably particularly meant for encouraging us not to go outside at night, as the swampy Chesapeake Bay area where my grandparents lived definitely had a lot of very real dangers!)

The second thing is that, while the Woolanie isn’t an official cryptid by anyone else’s standards, it is still a cryptid… just a… personal, family lore cryptid? In a nutshell, cryptids are the creatures that are part of “cryptozoology,” which is a combination of three Greek words: kryptos (hidden), zoon (animal), and logos (discourse). Cryptozoology is the study of (and sometimes hunt for) hidden or undiscovered animals, creatures like Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, etc. It’s usually referred to as a “pseudoscience” as opposed to a real science… but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there who wholeheartedly believe in it.

And that means, to folklorists, cryptids are urban legends and, instead of focusing on whether or not these creatures really exist, folklorists focus on what the stories about them mean. What is the story telling us? Why would someone tell this story in the first place? Which leads us back to the first point, that Woolanies were essentially a cautionary tale with a pretty specific purpose in my family.

In this case though, the family folklore side is also really important, and that’s the third thing. Urban legends do sometimes mix with personal narratives, though it’s pretty rare and definitely most common with cryptid urban legends because we sometimes get “encounter stories” straight from the source. But this is something different – family folklore is the folklore that binds a family together, the “artistic communication” that springs up in the “small group” of the family itself. Most of the time, when talking about family folklore, the focus is on things like holiday traditions or the stories that somehow always come up at reunion dinners. 

Having a family cryptid tradition? That’s pretty odd and special!

When I reached out to my siblings and cousins for anything they remembered about Woolanies, it was fun. It connected us back to our childhoods, to our grandfather, and to a place (my grandparents’ house on the Bay) that we all loved and felt deeply connected to. Most of us have lost a lot of our links to those things, so remembering this little bit of family lore was a beautiful moment of connection between us, a reminder of a shared past that may be gone but will never be forgotten. 

In many ways, it was another testimony to how powerful folklore can be. 

What’s your weirdest bit of family folklore? Reply in the comments and tell me, I’d love to know!