The Great Smoky Mountains, 1887. A young ethnologist named James Mooney climbs into the high country to write down the stories of the Cherokee elders. Among them is one the old folks didn't like to tell after dark.
Something flies over the ridges at night, trailing sparks and crying like a diving raven, looking for a house where someone is dying. The Cherokee called it the Raven Mocker.
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Legend at a glance
Legend: The Raven Mocker (Kâ'lanû Ahkyeliskï), from Cherokee tradition
Where: The Great Smoky Mountains, the Cherokee homeland
Recorded: By James Mooney, published in Myths of the Cherokee (1900)
Category: The Old Ways (folk belief and mountain tradition)
A note of respect: This story belongs to the Cherokee people
The most dreaded witch of them all
In the stories Mooney recorded, the Raven Mocker doesn't curse you. It comes for the sick and the dying, invisible to everyone in the room, and steals whatever life they have left. That makes it the most feared of all witches.
Sitting up with the dying
Because the Raven Mocker came for those already near death, families and medicine men would sit up through the night to guard the dying. In the episode, Silas tells of the medicine men who kept watch, the fate said to fall on any Raven Mocker seen in its true shape, and a young hunter who spent one long night in the wrong cabin.
An old mountain custom
From there, the story follows a thread that many Appalachian families still remember: the custom of sitting up with the dead, keeping watch through the night so the person is never left alone. Different peoples, different reasons, and the same instinct to stay close at the end.
A story that belongs to the Cherokee
The Raven Mocker belongs to the Cherokee people, who still call these mountains home. We share the version recorded by James Mooney with respect, and we encourage you to learn more directly from Cherokee voices, including the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and the Museum of the Cherokee People in Cherokee, North Carolina.
Sources
James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (Bureau of American Ethnology, 1900), "The Raven Mocker"
Myths of the Cherokee, full text, Project Gutenberg
"The Raven Mocker," Internet Sacred Text Archive
Pull up a chair, Holler Dwellers
Does your family still remember the custom of sitting up with the dead? We'd be honored to hear about it. Send it our way, and it might just end up on the show.
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Holler Nights is Bramble and Bone's limited bonus series of Appalachian ghost stories, legends, and things that go bump in the night. Find every episode in The Archive.
Told by Silas Cade. Researched and produced by KT.
