by Laura Holt
“Thy form alone is all, thank God, that to the grave is given; for we know thy soul the better part, is safe, yes safe, in heaven.”
This quote, inscribed on the overgrown grave of Emily Isabella Burt in an all but forgotten cemetery a short hike off a tiny mountain road, is all that remains of the woman my grandaddy often referred to as the Georgia Werewolf. Many local spook hunters interpret these words to mean that in death, she is finally free of the curse that forced her to turn into a ravenous she-beast. But is this cryptic sentence a confirmation that the legend of this shapeshifting monster is real? Or is there more to the tale that we have yet to unravel?
After all, where is the proof? There are far fewer werewolf sightings each year than there are, say, Nessie sightings. And despite being the state of the weird and supernatural, a werewolf roaming the hollows and hills in the southern US seemed a bit of a stretch. Still, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to investigate such a famous cryptid, especially one with a female protagonist who lived in my backyard. So, faster than you could say “Bad Moon Rising,” I packed my bags and set off on a road trip across the Peach State to get to the bottom of the story once and for all.
Talbot County—which, interestingly enough, bears the same name as the original wolfman from the 1941 film, Larry Talbot—is home to Woodland, a picturesque little town situated right outside of Calloway. The scenery outside my car window was full of winding roads surrounded by dense oak and pine forests, with steep drop-offs that make you hold your breath and go five miles an hour in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone, and divided by a single set of train tracks that still run today. (I know. I got stuck at them.) The courthouse bears the seal of its construction in 1892, and a Civil War monument erected in 1861 still stands out front. Had Emily Burt been tried as a werewolf, as many people with stories similar to hers were in 16th-century European werewolf trials, this is probably where she would have been brought to answer for her alleged crimes. Yet while there is a host of stories from supposed eyewitnesses who either saw her in werewolf form or suspected her of being one, there is no documentation that she was ever formally accused. And that doesn’t seem to have changed.
Despite the fact that I visited right in the middle of tourist season, I found nothing to advertise that I was in werewolf country. Main Street was lined with quaint little shops all open for business, including an old self-serve gas station where I stopped to fuel up on my quest. But aside from a battered copy of Legends, Lore, and True Tales of the Chattahoochee by Michelle Smith that I found at a second-hand bookstore, there was no monster memorabilia for sale, not even a werewolf keychain. And despite brimming with southern hospitality—including some of the best apple cider I’ve ever had—the people I spoke with had nothing to say about their local cryptid.
Emily herself proved just as elusive.
Aside from being the eldest daughter of a well-to-do family, there isn’t much we know about Emily Burt before her infamous transformation into a monster worthy of a Hollywood film. Pictures show her as a somewhat plain but attractive woman dressed in the high-collared dresses of the day, her hair pinned up in a sensible schoolmarm’s bun. She never married, nor had children, choosing to live alone in her family’s farmhouse until her death at age 70. Could it be this was the mark of a woman with a deadly secret? Or merely the lifestyle of an introverted, independent intellectual?
Every version of the legend about the Talbot County Werewolf seems to agree on one thing: that all of Emily’s troubles started after she returned from attending school abroad. Like the main character in the film An American Werewolf in Paris, folks began noticing odd things about the young woman. Bushy eyebrows, abnormal amounts of body hair, teeth that were a little too pointed, and a strange habit of roaming through the woods at night when a sensible lady her age ought to have been in bed. Around the same time, a rash of livestock killings struck the town, putting everyone on high alert. It wasn’t long before gossip and fear created the rumor that the brutal slayings could only be the work of something supernatural. When a group of men decided to go out one night and hunt the beast while Emily was sleepwalking at the edge of her property, and accidentally shot her in the hand, the belief that she was the culprit was cemented. Especially since the killings stopped soon afterward.
Now, we all know the basic legend of the werewolf: a human, cursed by an infectious bite, doomed to transform beneath the light of a full moon into a savage, wolf-like creature impervious to every weapon except one made of silver. However, according to Trenton Tye from the hit series Purgatory Ironworks, whom I had the unexpected opportunity to interview when I stumbled upon his live blacksmith demonstration in Thomaston, silver was forgeable. But bullets were cast in a mold, so they wouldn’t have been forged. This means the bullet Emily was shot with would have been made out of ordinary lead. If she were a werewolf, such a weapon would have had no effect. Except maybe pissing her off. Yet all accounts say the creature fled, howling in pain, when hit, lending credibility to a flesh-and-blood animal. Most likely a red wolf, once native to North Georgia in abundance and only now regaining a foothold thanks to the efforts of the conservation group at Chehaw Park in Albany, GA, where, from behind a thickly plated glass safety window, I was able to observe these incredible critters in their natural habitat.
Was it then simply a case of Emily being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Medical records show that she was treated for a series of autoimmune and mental diseases after her return from France, including one that would have caused her gums to recede, giving the appearance of fangs, and insomnia, which explains her sleepwalking.
This information isn’t exactly surprising. Women’s health has long been an area that is vastly overlooked. From as early as the 19th century and possibly even before that, owing to its origins in ancient Greece—the word hystera literally means wandering womb and is thought to be the basis of the original disease. Interesting, since menstrual cycles and madness have long been thought to coincide with the lunar cycles, a fact that puts them in the same bucket as most shapeshifting myths—hysteria was given as a diagnosis for a multitude of symptoms in females, including anxiety, fainting, and exaggerated sexual desire. Doctors, mostly men, often used this explanation to prescribe treatments for their ailing female patients, especially ones who did not conform to societal expectations. Like Emily. In many cases, women were institutionalized and subjected to horrific treatments against their will, like pelvic massages, being hung upside down, and even hysterectomies. And there is evidence to support that after the shooting incident, Emily was examined by a local physician who diagnosed her with lycanthropic hysteria, a disorder that causes a person to hallucinate turning into a wolf. Her family admitted her to a special hospital, where she stayed for the better part of her young adult life, not returning to Talbot County again until she was well into spinsterhood.
But why is there such a deeply ingrained fear of women acting outside society’s norms that it has led to centuries of harmful misdiagnoses, some of which persist today? How many of us have been told by a medical professional to “just calm down” or “stop being so hysterical” when we try to describe our pain on an exam table? How many women with real-life diseases like endometriosis, clinical anxiety, and chronic migraines are misdiagnosed and given medication that does nothing but dull their symptoms without actually healing them, and often, ends up making things worse?
The answer lies in stories like Emily’s, where a woman chose learning over marriage and domesticity was ostracized by her community, her physician, and her family.
We see it in myths the world over. In Japan, you have the Kitsune, a fox-woman who was forced into wifehood after a hunter stole her skin. Once she got it back, she escaped to the forest and now appears to hunters as a beautiful woman to lure them away from the safety of the path, at which point she transforms back into a fox and devours their liver. While across the Pacific, Hindu people once feared the Naga, a semi-divine race of female beings believed to be descended from the goddess Manasa, who gave her children the ability to take on either human or serpentine forms. To see why, watch what happens when a group of American G.I.s sneak into one of these ceremonies in Cult of the Cobra. Even Ireland is home to the Morrigan, who, along with being a warrior goddess and kingmaker before being driven out by St. Patrick, is often depicted as being able to turn into a raven or a crow. And the south is no different.
The Wampus Cat is a werecat that roams the Appalachians and is often said to have once been a female shaman with the power to shapeshift into the form of a mountain lion. One night, she used this ability to secretly observe a ceremony meant only for male shamans. The nerve. When the men discovered her, they cursed her to wear both forms for eternity. La Lechuza, a wronged woman who made a pact with the devil in exchange for revenge and was granted the power to turn into an owl, is said to fly across the Texas sky. Then you have the Ladies in White, flesh-eating ghouls with cavernous mouths and impossibly long limbs who died untimely, violent deaths at the hands of evil men. These undead critters haunt the back alleys and graveyards of New Orleans, protecting young women on the streets alone at night from meeting the same fates as them. Witnesses claim they appear first as human girls dressed in white who use their beauty to lure male victims away from crowded areas, where they reveal their true, monstrous visage before devouring them. Needless to say, these ghouls take no prisoners.
And maybe what is most surprising, or not, is what each of these creatures represents: a woman who longed to throw off their oppressive, proper form and become something wild and free, and maybe even a little dangerous.
From the country roads of Georgia to the wild moors of the Emerald Isle, the message is the same: transformation is our birthright as women. From birth to puberty to menopause and beyond, we can shed our skin, rise from the ashes of broken jobs and shattered relationships, and remake ourselves as many times as we want to. Our power is in the becoming of something new, of rewilding and finding ourselves over and over again outside of the black and white rules of our patriarchal society’s expectations, and embracing every part of ourselves, even the parts we are told to shy away from or fear. The light and the dark. The woman and the monster.
If you ask me, I think that’s the real secret behind the inscription on Emily Burt’s tombstone. Like all of us, she was more than just the sum of her parts. Not bad, necessarily, but not entirely perfect, either—after all, who among us is?—and that, in death, she was free at last to be herself.
It’s a sobering reminder as I lay a small bunch of wildflowers picked from the nearby bramble at the foot of her grave before beginning the trek back to my car, my eyes peeled for any rattlesnakes that might be lurking nearby. The fight for women’s healthcare and equality is still ongoing, even today, and for every stride we seem to make, we are forced to take two steps back.
Thankfully, the way is not completely dark thanks to those brave souls like Emily and many others who came before us. An army of women who dared to forge their path despite being ostracized and branded as ugly, different, and monstrous. As I drive home beneath the light of a full moon, I can almost hear her howling, compelling me to tell her story, and I smile despite everything, because I know that it’s not over yet. So long as there is at least one woman among us willing to stand up for what’s right, then the ones who try to oppress us, to hunt us down and snuff us out, will fail every time.